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The female-only aspect of this is the only part that interests the established media even slightly, but the ruling-class aspect is more worthy of investigation. I must say, the mention of the Bohemian Club on the Belizeans' Website tickled my antennae. I recommend to your attention G. William Domhoff's Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness, the 1975 edition of which is still available from Amazon. Naturally, with the passage of time it has become an historical rather than a contemporary analysis, and especially in view of other changes in the ruling class I don't know how big the Bohemians are nowadays.

I don't know, either, how successful the Belizean Club has been in imitating its male predecessor, but according to its Website it has certainly been trying:

Having observed the power of the Bohemian Grove, a 130-year-old, elite old boys' network of former Presidents, businessmen, military, musicians, academics, and non-profit leaders, and realizing that women didn't have a similar organization, Susan Stautberg and 26 other founding members created the Belizean Grove, a constellation of influential women who are key decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same.

It's fun to point out the hypocrisy (or outright deceit) of purported egalitarians on the Left who join exclusive-identity organizations while attacking others' freedom of association. It's even more fun pointing it out when those leftists are colored women who beat up on white men. But let's keep our eye on the ruling-class ball, here, and focus on the use of the P-word: "Having observed the power of the Bohemian Grove...." Be they goose or gander, the name of the game for these birds is Power. [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

Ugliness pageant. Carrie Prejean, the beauty queen who got in trouble with the homosexualists when one of them interviewed her at the Miss USA Pageant in April, has now been fired as Miss California USA by the pageant's owner — and the man who earlier had defended her during a risqué-photo crisis — Donald Trump.

Before now, I've been reluctant to write about the affair, for reasons that ought to be apparent. Culturally orthodox Westerners don't want to see women on these shores wandering about in black chador and veil, but on the other hand, it's a mite risky for us to honor, as a paladinette of the West, a girl who strips down on national TV.

Miss Prejean, though, certainly seems to have the right enemies. Evoking extra sympathy from me is the fact that she wasn't trying to make any enemies when she gave the pageant's homosexualist judge the "wrong" answer about so-called gay marriage. She told Mr. "Perez Hilton" (Mario Lavandeira) that she and her family believed not in "gay marriage" but instead in real marriage — which she described, awkwardly, as "opposite" marriage. In return for that honest expression of her personal beliefs, Mr. "Hilton" voted against her in the pageant, which some believe doomed her chances; and within hours he was calling her a "dumb bitch" on his blog.

Well, there's one homosexualist who will never be accused of being a feminist! All joking aside, the silence from the P.C. police upon this unleashing of the "B word" has rivaled that of the tomb, proving again that, for our supervisors, the important thing isn't what is said but who says it.

Of course, many normal people suspect — reasonably enough — that male homosexuals, whether activists for homosexualism or not, often harbor a hatred and revulsion for normal women. Nevertheless, it seems to have become routine for heterosexual beauty pageants to appoint male homosexuals either as judges or as commentators. I assume that has something to do with the high-fashion segment of the pageants, which must be included to attract some dollop of female viewers; but it's still a massively jarring and discordant development.

In response to Mr. "Hilton's" slurful spite and intolerance, the late-night comedians immediately began ridiculing — Miss Prejean! The worst offender to my knowledge is ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, who has derided Miss Prejean several times during his opening monologue. A gifted satirist, Mr. Kimmel is often gleefully disrespectful of the privileged minorities, but he marched right up and toed the System's line in this case, even making fun of Miss Prejean's grandmother, who, believe it or not, had never heard of "Perez Hilton" and assumed he was Hispanic. (Actually, if the Wiki article for "Hilton" is to be trusted, he is Cuban-American, of "Galician" ancestry. Kimmel's writers and researchers must have missed that.)

Now Miss Prejean has been dethroned as Miss California USA, ostensibly for failing to live up to her contractual obligations involving public appearances and what not. She and her spokespeople deny the charges, and she insists she lost her crown because she crossed the homosexualists. CNN's story of June 10 on Miss Prejean's sacking contains an inconvenient revelation that I didn't expect to see from a left-wing anticultural news organization, namely, that some of the "Miss California USA officials [are] outspoken advocates of same-sex marriage."

According to CNN, Mr. "Hilton" cheered Miss Prejean's dismissal: "Better late than never."

I'm not going to sink into the swamp of charges and countercharges involving Miss Prejean's contractual performance. Instead I'm simply going to ask:

Will this "Perez Hilton" man ever be invited to be a judge or commentator by another televised beauty pageant? In terms of income, public exposure, or reputation, will he pay any price for what he did? Time will tell, and it will also tell us how far gone we really are. [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

What does Barack Obama want? Now that General Motors has become Government Motors (and UAW Motors), socialists have confected another distracting dodge to keep non-socialists from worrying about socialism. It's a variation on the old "emergency" dodge, used by fans of American government since Lincoln's time (actually, since Washington's) to justify more Power and less Liberty.

The socialists — whose love "dare not speak its name" — are exclaiming, "Socialism! That's ridiculous! This is an emergency! You don't really believe President Obama wants to run GM, do you?" And their interlocutors are supposed to blink and blush and say, "Oh, well, of course not. Forget I said anything."

Of course not, indeed. B.H. Obama is no more eager to run GM in 2009 than J.V. Stalin was to run Glorious People's Automobile Factory No. 1 in 1935. Stalin turned over such picayune tasks to the Minister for Heavy Industry and his minions. The Great Teacher set his sights far higher.

And so does our own Great Teacher. Anyone who has attended to the declarations of the mainstream media over the past 20 years — long before anyone ever heard of Barack Obama — knows that the president doesn't focus narrowly on running a single company.

No, no, no. The very idea! What does the modern American president do? Why, he "runs the country." [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

Extraordinary government, 1. Robert Reich, secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, was on today's broadcast of NPR's Diane Rehm Show. He was asked whether the government takeovers of various businesses represented a move toward socialism, and instead of saying yes or no, he replied that these are extraordinary times, and government must step in to take extraordinary measures.

Apparently Mr. Reich believes that liberty is a luxury that people can afford only in prosperous times, but when there's trouble on the horizon, we have to turn to government management. If so, I would be inclined to agree with him that "we" cannot afford liberty — if only he would tell us who the "we" is. [Ronn Neff]
 

Extraordinary government, 2. Mr. Reich also assured listeners that he certainly hopes that the extraordinary measures being taken are temporary. But why should they be? If the free market and liberty are so ruinous that they caused The Mess We Are In (as Diane Rehm herself said on another occasion), why would anyone want to return to them? Why would anyone want to undo the measures we are told are protecting us from the ravages of the free market? [RNN]  (May 2009)

Maybe she's a strict destructionist. On the telescreen, the lavishly funded Left is already running campaign spots pushing Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation as a member of the Supreme Legislature. The sponsoring organization? Why, none other than the Coalition for Constitutional Values, at www.constitutionalvalues.org/.

The Left is just shameless, isn't it? But why shouldn't it be? It can get away with almost anything, here in America the Ovine. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. Oh! — I almost forgot to ask: Have you reread 1984  yet this year?

(May 2009)

We the Renting. On the 16th, Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at the University of California-Merced, and in it she alleged: "Service is the rent we pay for living.... It is the true measure, the only measure, of our success." She was quoting "advocate and activist" Marian Wright Edelman, a Negro child-welfarist and a left-wing critic of Bill Clinton's welfare "reform."

I had thought that taxes were the rent we pay for living, but it appears that once again, in the age of Obama, I was thinking too small.

True, calls for "service" are pretty much conventional in commencement speeches, and La Obama seemed to be speaking in a context of voluntarism. But of course the Obamites are not to be trusted in this.

Take, for example, the "national service" law that the Obamites and their congressional operatives imposed in April. If you can ignore the $5.7 billion in money robbed from taxpayers that will go to fund the program, and if you can ignore the larger fact that the Central Government — that least-voluntaristic of entities — has no imaginable business involving itself in such matters, it looks pretty voluntaristic. No one (it appears) will be forced at gunpoint to dress up in the costume of the Young Pioneers and march out, smiling grimly, to propagandize the Poor, the Sick, the Needy, and other especially downtrodden elements of the Gloooorious Workers and Peasants.

But look a little more closely, and you'll start to suspect that a hidden form of totalitarianism is at work — that is, Polite Totalitarianism as Ronn Neff has defined it.
 

I decided to spend a little time with Google, looking into this "service" business as it affects young folk. It turns out that, since 1997, Maryland has required what the educrats call "service-learning" of all students who wish to graduate from its government high schools. Yes, it is what you think it is, though I didn't find any actual mention of bedpan-emptying. A minute's further Googling revealed that "service-learning" is also required for graduation from the Chicago government schools and from the government schools in Broward County, Fla. (A Web page on "service-learning" posted by the Chicago Public Schools uses an epigraph from Cesar Chavez that would broil the cockles of any Randian's heart: "Surely the end of all education is service to others.")

Then I hit the site operated by the gracefully named Learn and Serve America's National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, which reports that in 2001 Maryland was still the only mandatory-volunteer state but that "six states (ID, MI, MN, NJ, NM, VT) include service-learning in the state's education standards," whatever that may mean — but it doesn't sound good. (For the benefit of those who prefer standard English, those damnable postal codes translate as Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Vermont.) Furthermore, "In Iowa, as of April 2003, local school boards may require service-learning units for a service-learning endorsement on a high school diploma or as a condition for graduation according to legislation passed by the Iowa General Assembly."

There, brothers and sisters, I suspended my research — but at this point let's note that an extensive and ongoing research project would indeed be necessary to sort out and keep track of what the states' school authorities and local school boards are getting up to, with this "service-learning" business, from year to year or even from month to month. Part of our project would involve figuring out to what extent the Obama national-service law will influence and encourage such local programs.
 

I'm sure it will, but how exactly? That's the Polite Totalitarian achievement right there: rendering the overall dimensions of the phenomenon relatively invisible to most people. The Obamites will be able to burble on about the "volunteerism" of "service" as they understand it, as the actual implementation dissolves among an archipelago of local authorities who will make it mandatory. For their part, the local authorities will prate about the "voluntary" nature of their coercion, since, after all, parents can always choose to send their children to private or parochial schools, or home-school them — though of course those lucky parents will have to pay to educate someone else's children in the state schools.

And the pincers of leviathan will have thrust out to envelop, and damage, even more of the American tradition of true charity and true voluntarism, which has already been partly enveloped and badly damaged by the Central Government's financing (and direction) of major "private" charities. Meanwhile, even without donning a Young Pioneer costume, young Americans will be even more limited to understanding "service" as the state defines it, and even less able to distinguish between their country and the state that rules it. Service — to the state — will indeed be the rent we pay for living. [Nicholas Strakon]

Ronn Neff comments on the oration:

Big talk from a woman who lives in a mansion and

– doesn't have to worry about her children's safety
– doesn't have to worry about her or her children's health or medical care
– doesn't have to worry about getting fired or laid off
– doesn't have to worry about her husband's getting fired or laid off
– doesn't have to worry about her or her husband's retirement
– doesn't have to worry about her own future if her husband suddenly dies
– doesn't have to worry about the price of groceries
– doesn't have to worry about the price of gasoline and
– doesn't even have to worry about veterinary bills.

Need I go on? As Joe Sobran has said, when these people talk of their own service, they mean something that pays pretty well. For the rest of us, it means something else entirely.

Of course, when Michelle Obama talks of "service," she is talking about making sacrifices, and as Ayn Rand said, whenever you hear someone talking about making sacrifices, you can be sure there will be someone collecting them.

"Sacrifice" probably has a nice, soothing sound to most Christians because they don't know that the only proper recipient of sacrifice is the deity; and they have forgotten that "to sacrifice" is "to make holy." Like most people, they think that sacrifice is something a devoted mother does for her children. Or that a good chess player does with his pawns. (May 2009)

As an old ink-stained wretch who still occasionally growls about how much better things were "back in the Days of Hot Type," I'm sad to see daily newspapers going, going, gone. The Respectable and Concerned actually ask a good question when they demand to know how distant bloggers on the Web are ever going to keep the zoning board, the city council, and the (government) school board honest in Fort Wayne, Fresno, Wilkes-Barre, and a thousand other home towns once the local presses stop rolling.

The papers cover other kinds of local news, of course — sports, traffic accidents, the Annual Purple Martin Festival, nonpolitical crime — and we'll miss all that; but there is something we can do to prevent corruptionists running amok once the Daily Bugle folds. Cue Frank Chodorov yet again. It was Chodorov, you'll recall, who gave the classic libertarian response when asked, during the '50s Red Scare, what he'd do about the dreadful danger of Commies in government jobs: "Abolish the jobs!" Hint, hint. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2009)

Another brain-dead mantra. As I've pointed out, the Obamites are using the Green frenzy as one of the chief devices for muscling up their big Red state. Accordingly, mouthpieces for the regime, both official and unofficial, are giving forth with a certain utterance more and more often: America has only 4 percent of the world's population but consumes 25 percent of "the world's energy."

I question whether the expression "the world's energy" is validly formulated — just whose energy is it, again? — but what I really want to ask here is:

So what?

Well, the Red Greens believe, or pretend to believe, that the state of affairs they report is self-evidently bad. And urgently in need of Change.

More than anything, it's the self-evident part that really gets my goat, and the fact that our supervisors can successfully sell it as self-evident. Once again, a screamingly obvious question languishes unasked, namely, how does America's energy consumption stack up against its production of wealth, vis-à-vis the rest of the world? Zimbabwe no doubt has a much smaller "carbon footprint" than America, but before choosing the Zimbabwean Way (with all its virtues) over the American Way (with all its vices), anyone still operating a live brain would want to know how Zimbabwe scored on the wealth-production front.

One might also want to know whether Zimbabweans have benefited at all, over the years, from American advances in medicine, manufacturing, transportation, communication, and energy production. And if they have not been permitted to benefit, whether that has been mostly the fault of productive Americans or mostly the fault of wealth-destroyers such as Mugabe.

Leftists seem to think that Americans spend all their time consuming and not producing; or, rather, that the only thing we produce is toxic waste. Well, that makes sense. Leftists have never been too swift when it comes to understanding the production of wealth. Wealth destruction, though: they've always been on top of that. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2009)

"Standing up for the little guy." Notre Dame University's invitation to President Obama to speak at Commencement has sparked a fiery dispute on and off campus because of Obama's stand on abortion; the Rt. Rev. John D'Arcy, bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, will be conspicuous in his absence from the ceremony.

Speaking today with MSNBC left-wing operative Andrea Mitchell, Kevin Tibbles, an NBC News reporter in Chicago, reported on what he considered the remarkable decline of Notre Dame since its radical-chic days when it was led by the "progressive" Father Theodore Hesburgh, cuddled up with Martin L. King and other "progressive" figures, and backed "progressive" causes. Straight-faced, Tibbles said that "the school has a history of human rights, of standing up for the little guy." As opposed to the regressive atmosphere now, you see.

"Little guy."  Wherever you stand on abortion rights, you've got to admit that that's funny — albeit dark, like so much of the Irony-Deaf Left's unintentional humor. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. We ought to remember that Notre Dame hasn't yet revoked its invitation. Moreover, I saw one news account indicating that a majority of students and professors are in favor of the Obama visit. What disturbs the leftist media, it seems, is that there's any controversy at all. (April 2009)

Try thinking outside the matchbox, guys. Walter Isaacson, head of the establishmentarian-reformist Aspen Institute, is proposing uniform nationwide standards for state-school performance. That amounts to a call for extending the nationalization and centralization of America's primary and secondary schools (and, by the way, the nationalization and centralization of thought), whether or not the Central Government would have to directly impose such standards.

Sad to say, Isaacson may win the support of some unwary non-leftists because he stipulates that simply pouring more taxpayer money into the state schools won't work, and also because his plan, if perfectly implemented, would break the stranglehold of the left-wing teachers unions where it now exists.

Isaacson wants to see more "innovative charter schools," charter schools being a corner of their tiny intellectual matchbox that reformists began to explore twenty years ago, with what amounted to dizzy excitement for such dozy mildcats. But charter schools are still state schools, even though some of them are managed by politically favored "private" contractors.

You've got to hand it to these establishmentarians, who are an inexhaustible fount of ideas that manage to be both mind-numbingly boring and screamingly utopian. Interviewed on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on April 13, Isaacson uttered not one word about really private, non-state education. Not even to criticize it!

Neither did anyone else.

I propose a thought experiment. Imagine that — owing to whatever historical contingency you like — the various levels of American government had never come to control most of the education industry, or, indeed, any part of it whatsoever. Would American children, on the whole, be more or less skilled at reading? More or less familiar with scientific and mathematical concepts?

Would they be more or less oriented in terms of time and space? — that is, more or less knowledgeable about history and geography?

Would they be more or less skilled at thinking? And would they be more or less attached to liberty and justice than they are now?

It's like asking whether the Russians and the Ukrainians and the other peoples under the rule of Moscow would have been able to feed themselves better or worse, ceteris paribus, had the Bolsheviks kept their bloody mitts off agriculture. I understand that counterfactuals can be tricky, but, come on, which way would you bet?

There's one good thing we can say about leviathan when it forces vital functions of society deeper and ever deeper into the black abyss. It makes such questions ever easier to answer.[Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. — The matchbox shrinks. Interviewed on the same episode of "Morning Joe," D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty opined that allowing state-school principals to hire and fire at will would amount to a form of "privatization." Another bold and revolutionary thinker heard from! (April 2009)

The AIG bonuses. The American people — having swallowed the camel of the stimulus bill and massive spending, sending billions to liberal projects and their executives — now strain at the gnat. [Ronn Neff]
 

That famously efficient socialism. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program for March 25, "fiscally conservative" socialist Howard Dean told viewers, "Medicare is much more efficient than the private sector is in health care. [Medicare's] administrative costs are about a third of what they are in the private sector."

Dr. Dean's assertion went unchallenged. He was not asked to cite his sources. No one remarked how counterintuitive his claim was, on the scale of, "Venus is three times as habitable for humans as Earth." No one asked him to define "costs," or wondered aloud whether he had manufactured some narrow, deceitful context within which his statement could be considered at least technically true. No one wondered, either, how it was that medical socialism came to be so much more efficient than "private" medicine, when in all other areas of endeavor socialist bureaucracy is notorious for driving up costs. No one asked him what he meant by "the private sector," more than forty years into a socialist pandemic that has crippled, stunted, and deformed the health-care industry.

No one even just screamed, "What?!"

It is breathtaking what left-wingers can get away with.

Contrast the meek acceptance of Dr. Dean's pronouncement with what you'd expect to hear if a partisan of freedom, on some mainstream show, should advance an equally succinct claim that Franklin Roosevelt's policies didn't end but instead worsened and extended the Great Depression.

I'd like to ask Dr. Dean what entity it was, enforcing what programs, that rendered the "private" sector so oddly inefficient.

But look on the bright side. It's comforting to learn that Medicare has successfully offloaded so many of its internal costs onto the "private" sector. Efficient, indeed! No doubt the KGB was pretty cost-efficient, too, in house; sad to say, though, it was awfully costly for Soviet society at large. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

Even a blind pig ... On February 25 the AP reported that Barack Obama had told various pols: "The choice we face is not between an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism."

For sure, that's not our choice, since "capitalism," if by that we mean the free market, is not chaotic and unforgiving. It's spontaneously ordered and humane, especially when compared with statism and the blood-painted state.

It's breathtaking to see the charlatan-in-chief say something that's literally true, even if he's too dim or deceitful to use words properly. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

Here's an entry for those who monitor the System's manipulation of our public language. I have reason to believe that those in charge of language and everything else are dropping the old phrase global warming in favor of the less-specific alternative, climate change. It seems that too many ordinary people have been making too many rude jokes during too many hard winters about global warming, and it's starting to get under the skin of the Totaligoreians.

I think I'll continue to say global warming. After all, I still say coed, Third World, Oriental, retarded, and Negro. While I'm on the subject, did you know that the System has even come up with new names for autism and multiple-personality disorder? Anything to keep us off balance. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

Lincoln again. On March 10, Maximum Leader Obama once again edged into what he believes is the glorious aura of Abraham Lincoln, in the course of "refus[ing] to temper his ambitious reform drive," as the Associated Press tendentiously put it. In other words, he's refusing to concentrate on the banking crisis — today's equivalent of Lincoln's War — and is trying to impose other kinds of "Chaaaange" while he has the chance. Obama explained that "Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of civil war."

Students of political history will indeed see a striking parallel here between Lincoln and the current president. It's no surprise that Lincoln did his best to ram through the entire Hamiltonian-Whig-Republican program during that sweet time for government consolidationists when Southern Democrats were out of Congress. As opponents of leviathan, today's Republicans come off as mountebanks or paralytics compared with 19th-century Democrats, but, still, if the GOP had remained strong in Congress it's reasonable to think that certain distinctively Obamite proposals would be encountering a colder reception.

The proto-fascist transcontinental-railroad project that Obama cited shows what can be done when your opposition is especially weak and demoralized. The route chosen by the Lincolnians ran through northern states and territories; in the years before secession, not-so-laissez-faire Southerners such as Jefferson Davis had promoted a southern route. And more important, Lincoln's congressional ally Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania ironmonger, inserted into the railroad bill a provision that only U.S.-produced iron could be used in construction of the road. Protection and subsidy of Northern manufacturers were basically what Whiggery and the new Republicanism were all about; and Southern Democrats had done their best to fight those ideologies when they were still in Congress.

Lincoln made the most of other opportunities that were created by the absence of an effective congressional opposition, ramming through two National Bank Acts and the introduction of "greenbacks," a national paper currency. All were represented, at least in part, as measures to finance Lincoln's war of aggression against the southern part of the country. That was convenient, and may put us in mind of the Obamites' insistence that their dirigiste Green-technology fascism is an important part of their war against Economic Badness, despite the fact that, until recently, most people had supposed that the Green madness would worsen general economic distress. (Perhaps Obama should not be as shy as he appears in his March 10 utterance and should claim that all his "reform" proposals will help restore prosperity, or at least a 14,000 Dow.)

Following on President Buchanan's Morrill Tariff of 1861, which helped precipitate Southern secession, Lincoln successfully pressed twice for even higher tariffs — again under the rubric of "war measures." It was just a coincidence that high tariffs were the traditional centerpiece of Whiggery and the bête noire of Southerners; or perhaps I had better say that it was no coincidence that a state-building, high-taxing leader such as Lincoln also turned out to be a war leader. Thomas Paine wrote more boldly about the tendencies of a previous government over America, the one run out of London: "A bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes."

Even the Homestead Act, beloved of some conservatives, reflected Lincoln's consolidationism and proto-fascism. (Ex-Confederates were barred from participating, by the way.) It reinforced the bizarre and disastrous notion that the state apparatus in Washington somehow owned and could rightfully dispose of unsettled land (and other natural resources) in the West; and it would furnish the railroads with customers they otherwise would not have had, as if it were not enough that those companies already wallowed in government land grants. The Act distorted the natural pattern of land ownership that would have arisen under true homesteading, tempting many naive pioneers into setting up stakes on land that was too arid for successful, long-term agriculture. (The railroads actually ran ads and distributed booklets in Europe to lure emigrants to the supposed Eden of the Great American Desert.) That, in turn, set the stage for pharaonic government water programs and other agricultural subsidies that have further empowered the Central Government while continuing to distort patterns of settlement in our country.

Obama is right to compare himself to Lincoln. Thaddeus Stevens wasn't as frank as Rahm Emanuel, or he might have been the first to publicly trumpet the great strategy of leviathan: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

"Do you hope Obama will fail?" Rush Limbaugh has ignited a peculiar little controversy by expressing the hope that Obama will "fail." It's my understanding that Limbaugh has actually voiced two different hopes. I've heard him voice one of them on TV: that Obama and the other Democrats will fail to impose all of their declared policies on our hapless country. The second version, which for our purposes I'm assuming he also really voiced, is the hope that if the Obamites do succeed in imposing their policies, the policies will fail to produce economic recovery. It's that version that has been seized upon by the Obamites and the mainstream media (if we may distinguish those two groups from each other). And it's the more interesting of the two.

However we classify Limbaugh (and I am not a fan), partisans of freedom and justice naturally hope that the Obamites will fail to impose their fascist and socialist policies. We even hope that the fascist and socialist policies previously imposed will be lifted, although we haven't been holding our breath all our lives waiting for that to happen. But do we hope that fascism and socialism will fail, as already imposed and if imposed more fully?

It's a trick question. If we answer yes, our adversaries will accuse us of irrational pride and "narrow partisanship": the success of our adversary's program would mean that our entire philosophy was wrong. And we are too small, too close-minded to contemplate that. But if we answer no, we undermine ourselves also by implying that we think fascism and socialism have a chance of succeeding in bringing us good things.

The proper answer is, instead, that we know fascism and socialism will fail, in terms of freedom and justice, just as the murder, rape, robbery, and arson carried out by unofficial criminals fail categorically in terms of morality. Our study and contemplation of economy, history, society, logic, morality, and the nature of man have convinced us that fascism and socialism must fail, leaving peaceful, non-parasitic people less free, as well as materially poorer. Being asked whether we hope fascism and socialism will fail is rather like asking us whether we hope that some gangster's attempt to add two and two, and come up with five, will fail. Looked at that way, a trick question collapses into one that is merely silly and stupid.
 

Undaunted, and somewhat inattentive, our interlocutor may say that freedom and justice are both fine things, on those rare occasions when we can afford such fripperies, but what if Obamism produces "economic recovery"?

We must ask what "recovery" could possibly mean, in Obamite terms. Success in preserving the politically driven malinvestments that have not yet been liquidated? Success in rescuing ruling-class criminals by further robbing American taxpayers? Success in suppressing true economic interest rates through the political means? And encouraging worse malinvestments in other ways, too? Success in "putting people to work" — at uneconomic, politically created jobs?

Success, that is, in stopping the junky's withdrawal and putting him back on heroin, or introducing him to methadone?

Or would Obama's fascist and socialist policies remove the obstacles now interfering with the market's stupendously splendid cybernetic mechanism, allow people to trade in honest money, leave property in the hands of those who have earned it, strip away all politically awarded privilege, permit "capitalist acts among consenting adults," and — generally — get the state the hell out of our way? By definition: No. If the American economy ever accomplishes a genuine recovery, one that does not increase the political crime rate, it will occur despite the criminal efforts of Obama, Pelosi, and their masters.

Forgive me if, as an old Randian, I observe that it's just impractical to separate the moral and the practical. Crime can "succeed," but only for the criminal, not the victim. We can't define crime without understanding equal liberty and rightful conduct, nor can we define the opposite of crime — economic behavior. A free people spontaneously cooperating in an environment of justly held property, honest money, and an unfettered price system is the economy. Anything short of that is less than an economy, and more of a crime. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

May I freshen your paradigm? After the most recent revelations of regulatory dub-flubbing — by the FDA and Bernie Madoff's cronies at the SEC — we're hearing the standard cries for more and better regulation. I even heard some poor chap on the telescreen calling for better regulation of the regulators!

The FDA's predecessor agency won its first regulatory authority in 1906, and the FDA gelled into its modern form in 1927. The SEC was founded in 1934. And lo, these many years later, both outfits are still notorious for intractable fumblitis, shading into actual corruption in the case of the SEC. Now fans of regulation want to reward the agencies with even more power to do harm. That's utopianism verging on head-banging autism, and I doubt I've ever seen folks who stood in more urgent need of a paradigm shift. But it won't happen no matter how bad things get, as long as the established intelligentsia manages to represent fascism as laissez-faire, and confines true free-market thinking to an intellectual ghetto. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2009)

Ronn Neff observes: Appearing on C-SPAN on January 29, Ron Paul said a lot of incisive things about the bailout, the free market, and government spending. But he also said this:

The role of government ought to be to provide a sound currency, to provide freedom in the marketplace, to make sure people follow through on their contracts, nobody can commit fraud, and nobody can commit violence.

Nicholas Strakon observes: Paul appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on January 27, and in that forum, too, he said many incisive things about the bailout, the market, and spending. I particularly liked his reference to the costs of the U.S. Empire in connection with the economic collapse. Or, rather, I liked the first part of it. Right after mentioning the absurdity of American tax-victims' paying to build bridges in Iraq, Paul proposed more Central Government spending on the state "infrastructure" here at home. Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower (Barney Frank, too), meet your new friend Ron Paul.

And what did that concession buy him? Well, it didn't help him at all in the eyes of two panel members, Dylan Ratigan the Wall Street semi-fascist and Mike Barnicle the FDR fascist/socialist, who derided Paul as, essentially, an idiot who wants to "do nothing and let 'em starve."

It was a nice demonstration of what a man earns when he departs from principle in the presence of his enemies. (February 2009)

More bad faith from the Left. A whole raft of statist PSAs are airing on the telescreen at the moment — actually, they'll probably be airing from now on, here in the USSA. Most of them push Green totalitarianism, but the one that irritates me the most — because it's so profoundly dishonest — promotes the Employee Free Choice Act, notorious among pro-market people as "card check."

The spot comes to us courtesy of the American Rights at Work Education Fund, with a Website at www.freechoiceact.org. ("Rights at Work," instead of the old conservative shibboleth "Right to Work," get it?)

The PSA's narrator says: "We voted on Election Day for hope and change. Now it's time for action. The Employee Free Choice Act lets workers choose to join a union to earn better pay, health benefits, and job security." (Emphasis spoken in original.)

Imagine that! American workers actually being allowed to decide whether or not to join a union!

It's as if the Wagner Act (1935) had never been passed, or any of the other Roosevelt labor laws. Haven't all the state schools, state-licensed media, and union shills told Americans for decades that the Roosevelt laws, and the later amendments and reinforcements thereof, were a smashing victory for the oppressed worker and his freedom to organize? But now union leftists themselves are willing to ignore and insult their former demigod Roosevelt in order to extend his program, namely, extinguishing employees' (and of course employers') freedom of association by propping up Big Labor's officially privileged position as a junior partner in the socialist/fascist System.

The point of the "card check" bill is to minimize the number of unionizing elections conducted by secret ballot; the government-dependent unions hope that more employees would approve unionization if they had to declare themselves publicly by either checking a card or declining to check it, in the presence of glowering union thugs. Now, personally, I'd like to see the secret ballot dropped, at least in government elections — it worsens the irresponsibility inherent in mass voting — but I'm focusing here on this latest breathtaking distortion produced by the Left. The Left's reality-filter makes a funhouse mirror look like the Hubble space telescope.

But the more ignorant the sheeple become, the more the Big Liars can get away with. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2009)

Innumeracy in power. In his inauguration speech, Obama said, "Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath."

Is it really too much to ask that a president or his speechwriters be able to read a list of names in an almanac?

It may be that it is proper to refer to Grover Cleveland both as the 22nd and as the 24th president. He may be two different presidents, but he is not two different men. He is not two different Americans.

Only 43 Americans have taken the presidential oath. [Ronn Neff]
 

Modine Herbey comments: Under the Obama Numbering System, 45 Americans have now taken the oath. After all, Obama himself took it twice. (February 2009)

"Divisive." Since Barack Obama's victory in November, the established media have been assuring us that the Culture War is over. In fact much blood-letting remains to be accomplished before our dread adversaries manage to extinguish all the bitter-end resistance in all the "last ditches," but in a strategic sense, Minitrue is correct: it is over. (And it was over long before Obama's election.)

However, I still find myself shaking my head in amazement as I watch Minitrue pursuing and extending its party line with the assurance, serenity, and matter-of-factness of the Soviet media propagating the Stalinist world-view in 1938. On January 19 one of MSNBC's left-wing operatives, Andrea Mitchell, interviewed "openly gay" Episcopal bishop V. Gene Robinson about the Inaugural festivities and the prospects of the Obama regime, and she led off by asking the Right Reverend what he thought of Obama's choice of Pop Preacher Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the Inauguration. Warren, though hardly a threat to the System, has not yet fully endorsed its homosexualist program, and in her opening question Miss Mitchell described him as a "divisive" figure.

"Divisive"? Ignorant viewers were afforded no background on the civil war in the Episcopal Church or the damage that that ancient institution has suffered, actually leading to schism, thanks to homosexualists such as Robinson. No: it's normal people who are "divisive" now, in the eyes of our masters and their mouthpieces.

Answering Miss Mitchell's question, Robinson said he was "very disappointed" that Warren would be appearing. Now, Robinson himself gave the invocation at one of the Inaugural Obama-Worship Services, the "We Are One" concert on the Mall, held January 18. But by official definition, no divisiveness can attach to Robinson's appearance or, more generally, to an event proclaiming that "We Are One." If We Are One, then of course We can have Only One Opinion about important matters such as homosexualism and its political promotion. Accordingly, Miss Mitchell interviewed no one who considers Robinson a "divisive" figure. (By the way, this sort of psywar is what our adversaries are referring to when they warble about promoting "diversity.")

However disappointed Robinson may be by the choice of Warren, he expressed confidence that Obama would succeed in advancing homosexualism. As the kids say: Well, duh! [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2009)

"They kept us safe." As the Bush regime finally slinks to its end, that claim seems to be what the remnant of Bush/Cheney/neocon fans are hanging their ragged hats on.

We know that the Bushites failed to keep our liberty and property safe from the grasping mitts of the banditti outside the Executive Branch — i.e., Republocrat socialists and fascists, and the criminal masterminds (or masterdoofuses) of the ruling class. Worse, our liberty and property were hardly safe from the grasping mitts of the Bushites themselves. Please excuse the understatement.

But let's limit ourselves to the Bushites' own definition of safety. As Bush himself indicated in his farewell speech, what the Bushites mean by safety is safety from foreign terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism. Well, it smells like bull ... derdash to me. As I've written before, I doubt that the best way to keep from being stung is to detour far out of one's way to poke a stick into a hornets' nest; but I'll be merciful and refrain from droning on about the United State's 60 years of nest-poking in the Middle East. Instead, this is my question for today: Are we really expected to believe that a regime that was stupendously incompetent even within the overall historical context of government incompetence somehow succeeded in being super-competent with respect to domestic security?

I do try to nurture my inner child, but even if I eventually come to believe in unicorns, leprechauns, and the saintliness of Barack Obama, I don't think I have it in me to believe that.

The Bushites adduce a long list of specific terrorist conspiracies that they claim to have foiled, including many conspiracies that we seem never to have heard of before. And they refer to other conspiracies that they can't describe, because of, you know, National Security. A comrade of mine asks a question simple but profound: Why should we believe any of it? Why should we trust them, of all people? If the Bushites were notorious — even within the established government context — for making off with our liberty and property, they were equally notorious for gang-raping the truth. [Nicholas Strakon]

A different assessment. It occurs to me that the policies of George Bush and the promised policies of Barack Obama are going quite a long way to protect us from terrorist attacks, and that we at The Ditch have been insufficiently grateful to them and for them.

Consider: We have been repeatedly told that the reason the terrorists were targeting the United State was that they hate us for our freedom and our prosperity.

Bush has certainly done quite a lot to diminish both, and Obama promises to continue to diminish them.

It won't be long before the terrorists won't have any reason whatever to hate us. [Ronn Neff] (January 2009)

Pilots. Three cheers for US Airways's hero pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger III. Although other acts of heroism — and industry and inventiveness — still often occur in our country, the filter of the established media rarely allows us to learn of them. Instead, in covering News of the Homeland, the media focus on the acts of fools or knaves: that is, of politicians, bureaucrats, war criminals, police thugs, gutter-licking celebrities, and, of course, private-sector felons (whom they consider less praiseworthy). The closest we come to hearing about actual heroes, and usually it's not very close, is when we're fed change-of-pace "human interest" stories sticky with sentimentalistic and welfarist pabulum.

For quite a few years now I've been wondering what the country will be like when the Sullenberger types finally disappear — those white men with the "pilot personality" who are irreplaceable in many vocations beyond aviation: scientific and technological research, engineering, sanitation, construction, railroading, power generation, medicine, and so on. Even in some occupations dominated by government, the "pilot" types render the haplessness of bureaucracy less grievous than it otherwise would be: I think immediately of NTSB accident investigators, air-traffic controllers, and firemen and other rescue experts. Not all are chronologically old, to be sure; but the types I'm referring to are all of the old school.

As the nonwhite demographic revolution and the white cultural collapse speed up, the "pilot" population is not sustaining itself at a socially survivable rate. That does not trouble Zeitgeist fans and System defenders in the slightest, as they believe, or claim to believe, that all people are interchangeable and that no cultural-sexual-racial group is irreplaceable or even particularly important. (My own straining hope is that Asian males can pick up some of the slack — they do keep some of their own native societies up and running — but I recognize that they're just not the same.)

Apart from the times when some instructive event, such as the successful ditching of US Airways flight 1549, smacks them on the forehead, many Americans see the "pilot" only as the butt of jokes and target of satire. You've seen him a million times in the movies and on "Saturday Night Live." He's the humorless white guy wearing the short-sleeve white shirt, narrow black tie, pocket protector, and Brylcreemed crewcut. In the '60s, when his longhair contemporaries were raising hell, he was walking across the M.I.T. campus enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke and swinging a slide rule from his belt. He's authoritarian, sexually repressed, workaholic, blindly linear, patriarchal, racist, homophobic, gun-obsessed, carnivorous — and, worst of all, just too, too white. He's both fool and knave, really. Down with him! ... except for when — oops! — we suddenly need him to save our bacon.

Now it's true that the "pilot" typically cultivates some attachments that we partisans of freedom deplore and regret — perhaps most notably, to national-statism, imperialism, and militarism. Sullenberger himself is an Air Force veteran, like many commercial airline pilots, and many such men naturally labor under a history of war crimes. But I'm trying to focus here on their socially productive and virtuous contributions; and it's easy to predict that as the "pilot type" vanishes, accidents and interruptions of service will increase, maintenance will deteriorate, and innovation and efficiency will decline. I should say: Will continue to increase, deteriorate, and decline.

And the sheeple will start to suffer many more forehead-smacks of the negative kind: electrical blackouts, hospital disasters, food adulterations, derailments, airplane catastrophes, uncontrollable fires, toxic spillages, water- and sewer-line failures, and on and on. It will be interesting to see whether those smacks are any more educational than the inspiring kind exemplified by Sullenberger's heroism; I expect not. Fellow passengers, brace for impact. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2009)

Rod's revenge. I know I've said some hard things about Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich — while suggesting that he's nothing more than a medium-size lump on the broad continuum of all pols — but unexpectedly I'm starting to be a fan of the man. I always enjoy seeing self-righteous Red Guards hoist sky high on any of their numerous petards, and now old Blago has blowed 'em up real good. The comrade commissars in control of the Senate have been harrumphing about how they'd refuse to seat anyone whom Blago appointed to fill the Obama vacancy — whereupon he up and named an old Negro hack named Burris. If the comrade commissars reject Burris, there will be no Negroes in the Senate.

Will the Guards really dare to reject him, offending The African American Communi-TEE and hordes of racially soggy whites? I'm laying in some popcorn and Junior Mints. Should be a fun show. [Nicholas Strakon]

Modine Herbey comments: The Guards are a clever bunch of lads and lassies. Depending on what happens to Blago in the near term, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Comrade Senators cobble together some kind of Negro Replacement Strategy, allowing them to seat a Person of (the Correct) Color who doesn't carry the Blago stink. (December 2008)

Survival of the slickest. How about that Blagojevich fella? His problem, of course, is that he has no sense of subtlety. Selling a Senate appointment is just business as usual, but you don't go around bragging about it, you stupid oaf! You use code words.

You say stuff such as: "Of course, we'll have to take a lot of things into consideration, and I'm not ruling out appointing myself to the position." Or: "I want to make sure that the interests of the people of Illinois are best served by this appointment." Or: "We need to have a senator who can work together with the governor to advance the interests of the people of Illinois."

To give people an idea of what you want, you find excuses to talk about what you want to do after you leave office: "It's a little early to think about such things, of course, but I'm hoping I could use my skills to help a non-profit such as (blank)." And so on. Let them figure it out.

But Blagojevich couldn't resist imitating Tony Soprano, and in doing so showed that he really doesn't know how to play the game — all the more so because he knew that the Authorities were already interested in him owing to the fact that his father-in-law, a Chicago ward-heeler, had already accused him of similar shenanigans. That put him squarely in the sights when it came time to thin the herd. [David T. Wright] (December 2008)

Copernicus and the bailouts. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) is best known for providing the first scientifically based theory of the heliocentric structure of the solar system. But he was a true polymath, with interests that went far beyond astronomy, and significant accomplishments in mathematics, medicine, canon law, and economics.

The debasement of coins was a major problem in Copernicus's day. Government authorities debased their coinage — not even kings could get away with fiat paper money in the 16th century — in the belief that it would increase their wealth. Copernicus recognized the problems that this approach was causing. He advised both the Prussian Diet and the Polish king to maintain sound money, and at the behest of the latter wrote a tract on the subject. His key assertion was: "Money loses its value when it becomes too abundant." In short, Copernicus understood the cause and perils of inflation. He saw the debasement of coinage as one of the four disasters that could befall a country, the other three being discord, high mortality, and poor harvests.

While Copernicus was able to bring about a revolution in thinking about the cosmos, a comparable Copernican revolution in economics has yet to be achieved. The current trillion-dollar bailouts show that the old "geocentric" theory still prevails among Establishment economists. [Stephen J. Sniegoski] (December 2008)

Happy days are here again! "This is a sad day for government," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald declared on December 9 in his news conference after the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Yes, indeed, and that made it a happy day for us. Whenever some cesspol goes down and it makes big headlines, we anti-statists have a fine teaching opportunity.

Assuming that the National Secret Police really have the goods on him (always a good question), Blagojevich has managed to outdo most of his fellow sewer rats — Illinois sewer rats, which makes this an unusually pungent chunk of cheese. (His predecessor is still in prison.) It was smelly enough when he threatened to block a state subsidy for the financially sick Tribune Company until it fired some Trib writers who were critical of Blago; and denying approval for a children's-hospital expansion unless the hospital paid him off really pumped up the reek; but the FBI says that the man actually was aiming to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Any time now, the League of Women Voters goody-two-shoes goofs are sure to start handing out their ancient prescription: We need to start electing good people! And ... and ... pass more anti-corruption laws!

Through how many elections, and how many scandals, in Illinois and elsewhere, have well-meaning naïfs been saying that?

As I've suggested, lank-locks Blago is a champ of corruption. He makes his next-door colleague, Hoosierdom's Mitch Daniels the Technocrat, look like Cato the Elder. But, you know, I'll bet that even old Cato knew his way around bagmen and bribes and back-alley threats, because Roman politics and the Roman state were inherently corrupt. All politics and all states tend toward corruption, in the Actonian sense. And why does power corrupt? By definition, states depend on the initiation of force; and initiating force is a crime.

Along the way here, meditate a bit on the Trib scandal: the Tribune Company was willing to whine for loot robbed from taxpayers, and Blago's state government had the power to do that robbing and hand out that loot to favored clients. That's an inherently corrupt and criminal state of affairs, and it is so regardless of Blago's participation. Forget Blago: it's officially legal!

While we're talking inherent corruption and criminality, you might want to meditate, too, on the much vaster loot-distribution that has occurred and continues to occur in Washington. That, too, is all legal. After all, governments define for themselves what is legal. (That's more apparent nowadays because, unlike the government of the Old Republic, the modern Imperial Government doesn't bother hiding its criminality behind all of that outdated mystical claptrap about the Constitution.)

An inherently criminal and corrupt entity is naturally going to attract criminals and would-be criminals to operate it. Now I see two characteristic types of politicriminals. One is the Blago type, interested in grabbing all the loot he can. The other is the Robespierre type, interested in forcing what Thomas Sowell calls the "Vision of the Anointed" on the hapless people he rules. In terms of murderous psychopathology, the first resembles the Mob hitman, merely looking for a good payday, while the second resembles the serial killer, uninterested in money and looking for, shall we say, more-intrinsic psychic rewards.

From time to time you'll find a pol who manages to inhabit both categories: Hillary Clinton is a good example. Throughout her public life she's always been a genuine Red totalitarian — but allied with Hot Springs Bill she also proved herself a pretty avid boodle-girl. Most of the successful Negro politicians, too, combine socialism (insofar as it seems to favor their race) with corruption as traditionally defined. Charlie Rangel is merely the latest example.

I admit that most pols come off as "moderates" in their criminality compared with Blago, the Clintons, and Rangel. In some cases, that's only because their own scandalous illegality hasn't yet become public. But in all cases, even "honest" pols are hip deep in a legal criminal conspiracy against the people, and all the elections until the end of time can't change that. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. Let's hope that some of the Blago stink attaches itself unwashably to the Commissar of Cool himself, who emerged from the same political sewer as the man he helped become governor.

A "betrayal" of the "innocent" voter? Anarchists debate whether voting is inherently a criminal act, but I think we'd all agree that a criminal mentality is revealed any time a voter casts a ballot in order to share some boodle stolen from a peaceful neighbor or in order to see some Vision of the Anointed imposed on that peaceful neighbor. I leave it to the reader to estimate how many of the votes cast in November fall into those categories. [Modine Herbey]  (October 2008)

"Joe the Plumber." You know what I think of the candidate who first met "Joe the Plumber" and what I think of the candidate who then lionized him, but my view of Ohioan S. Joseph Wurzelbacher himself is much more benign. That's especially so since the Red Guards of the Glorious People's News Collective started knocking over desks, chairs, and seven different kinds of recycling bins in their rabid rush to destroy him.

Various technical nigglings about Joe's economic prospects and projected tax rate feature in the media coverage, but a CBS story's headline conveys what the newsies are really focusing on: "Joe The Plumber: Unlicensed, Owes Back Taxes."

CBS puts it this way in its October 17 dispatch: "Joe the Plumber's story sprang a few leaks." One of them is supposed to be the fact that Wurzelbacher "isn't really a licensed plumber." The form of that attack tells us much about a modern American derangement. CBS is clearly implying that since Wurzelbacher isn't licensed, he isn't actually a plumber. The man does plumbing; he works as a plumber; he plumbs, for heaven's sake — but that's irrelevant in light of the fact that some government entity hasn't waved a magic credential and chanted some bureaucratic litany over him. Governmental rituals and paperwork take precedence over the facts of reality.

If you think about it, that nicely parallels government's idea that the fiat currency it conjures out of nothing is real money, whereas gold isn't money at all.

The CBS dispatch deepens the nastiness in characterizing as another "leak" in the "story" the fact that Wurzelbacher "owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes." In other words, some other government entity wants to rob Wurzelbacher of more money than it has already managed to steal from him. The robber barons of Ohio have slapped a lien on him until he ponies up all the loot they want.

In the view of the Red Guard media, that's supposed to make us think less of this hard-pressed but hopeful craftsman. No doubt all fraternal workers and peasants will erupt in spontaneous demonstrations throughout Oceania and denounce the class-traitor Wurzelbacher.

In the meantime, don't forget that it's we partisans of freedom who are the running dogs of greed and elitism, and the enemy of ordinary people. [Nicholas Strakon, unlicensed writer]

Ronn Neff would like to know: What on Earth does any of that unlicensed or back-taxes business have to do with what Joe Wurzelbacher asked or the answer that was given to him? Why is any of it relevant and what is it relevant to?

It shows that the left-wing media — let's change that — it shows that the extremist left-wing media in this country will destroy anyone in order to secure a win for their boy.

Evil or just illiterate? I find myself asking that question all the time these days. And I asked it again on October 20 when a newsreader for the Fort Wayne CBS affiliate, WANE-TV, referred to "the now-infamous Joe the Plumber."

"Infamous"! [Modine Herbey] (October 2008)

Truth and untruth in dirty hands. Fans of the National Forensic League and the House of Commons lament the lack of classic debating between our candidates for emperor, but they may as well save their breath. That kind of debating is the last thing the pols' handlers and spinners want. Our pols don't debate so much as collide on the issues. (Once in office, of course, they often change a vowel and collude.)

Sometimes a little bit of truth or probable truth leaks out from those collisions. I often say that we can believe a politician only when he's smearing his opponent, and I'm not just joking. But, still, on the level of actual ideas there's a frustrating quality to most of the pol-collisions we see.

One reason is that pols usually propose action on the basis of their Polite Totalitarian premises: We'll pass a law! Expand government power! Intervene in that country! No, intervene in that other country! Tax! Subsidize! Prevent! Require! Imprison! Since totalitarianism is the enemy of logic, morality, economy, society, and all else that is true and good, it's easy for the pol's opponent — if he or his handlers enjoy a three-digit IQ — to predict unjust or otherwise negative effects from this or that tax, this or that "program," this or that foreign intervention.

But there's a second, more interesting reason that pol-collisions tend to be unproductive, and it moves in the opposite direction, making for a sort of pincer operation. Pols still sometimes interrupt their outright socialist or fascist preaching to praise freedom, property, "fiscal responsibility," and restraint abroad, ladling out some reassuring libertarian-ish pabulum to voters who remember, however dimly, that at one time those things were supposed to be a part of the Glorious American Story. (The replacement American population will not demand or even understand that kind of stroking, but we're not quite there yet.) The trouble with the libertarian-pabulum approach is that a pol's opponent can immediately show how it contradicts "fairness," "equality," "progress," "our security," the need to "protect the disadvantaged," and so on. It threatens "education," "health care," "the environment," "economic stability," "energy," "jobs," and all those other general categories that are nowadays understood in purely totalitarian terms. (Such an attack, of course, must be preceded by the disclaimer that "of course everyone believes in freedom and all that stuff, but ...")

Moreover, an opponent usually has no trouble in casting doubt on the candidate's good faith, since virtually no one is sincere in praising freedom, property, and so forth. That very thing happened to John McCain when he characterized as socialist his opponent's plan to "redistribute" wealth (i.e., steal even more from taxpayers and pass out a portion of the loot to the politically favored). Well, it certainly is socialist. Obama is a socialist, wearing a tissue-thin messiah mask. But McCain's opponents immediately asked the old fellow a couple of difficult questions. Aren't his proposals for building infrastructure with taxpayer money also "redistributive"? Doesn't that make them socialist, too? How about the Wall Street Bailout? If we're socialists, well, you're a socialist, too! McCain's intellectual integrity and consistency were immediately undermined, at least in the eyes of anyone who still cared about the principle of contradiction.

It comes down to this. Whenever a pol proposes some totalitarian program, consisting as always of unfathomable technicalities, illogicalities, and imponderables, it's easy for his opponent to show its true defects — while going on to claim that his totalitarian program will work better. But whenever a pol pretends to be in favor of true freedom and justice, it's equally easy for his opponent to explode in a demagogic frenzy and show how his foe has departed from the tyrannical proposals and institutions that people really cherish.

Trying to derive enlightenment from pol-collisions is worse than a waste of time. Try too hard, and you may poison your mind. [Nicholas Strakon]

Note. I place those irritating quote marks around "redistribute" because the very idea of redistributing wealth itself harbors a socialist premise. In a free society wealth is not originally "distributed" by some authority. It is created and earned and freely exchanged.

It is only when we understand how profoundly our very language and thought have been shaped by statism that we are able to become realistic about the prospects for liberty. (October 2008)

Bulletin from the Malabar Front! Coalition forces have killed al Qaeda's number two man in Iraq, according to news reports today. That may be worth reporting, but it's not worth crowing about. How many times in the past five years, I wonder, have coalition forces killed al Qaeda's number two man in Iraq? According to CBS News, the latest number two man became number two only in June 2007.

Going back a few years before 2007, I can remember when we were told that coalition forces had destroyed the Taliban.

This isn't World War II, when it would have been genuinely big news if the Allies had succeeded in killing the Wehrmacht's number two man in the West — Erwin Rommel — a week before D-Day. What it is like (as other commentators have observed) is an interminable game of Whack-a-Mole. Just a reminder.

While we're in a reminiscing mood, it's probably a good idea to remember also that it's thanks to Bush and his neocons that al Qaeda is in Iraq. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (October 2008)

"We're all socialists now, comrade," reads the headline on an (anti-socialist) opinion piece by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph, written after the British government decided to re-capitalize major banks. Actually, of course, most people in the West have been socialists for a long time now. Or fascists and fascist dupes, with fascism understood as socialism for the rich and well-connected.

No one with half a brain took Sociopathic Bill seriously when he said that "the era of big government is over," but many had been less cautious, and more credulous, a few years before when Sovietism disintegrated. Even the chatterers of the established media started to sound less pink. They admitted, grudgingly or otherwise, the failure of impoverished slave-holes such as North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe, and suddenly announced that "markets" were the way to go after all. (Those with an ear for language noticed that they never actually talked in terms of "the free market," as real free-marketeers do. Neocons, by the way, prefer the label "democratic capitalism" for their own ideal of welfarist fascism.) Liberal commentators praised Red China's movement from straight socialism to a more fascist system. And mass-media consumers began hearing the name "Hayek" three or four times a year, instead of once every couple of years; and the name "Mises" once every couple of years, instead of never.

As it turned out, none of that represented a real change of mind. It was just a necessary mental dance. Now the three-minute waltz has ended and the System's intelligentsia are back to boogying all night long, down at the People's Glorious and Fraternal House of Progressive Recreation.

Even our pinko eggheads had to stipulate that socialism dominated the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but no such recognition is necessary when the System's socialists and fascists set off a new business crisis on these shores. Until recently System courtiers liked to advertise the American Way as a "mixed" economy that somehow was always in urgent need of more socialist ingredients in the "mix," but now they've gone from bad to worse, actually characterizing the political-economy they're responsible for as "laissez faire."

Their recurring diagnosis is more than a hundred years old, if you go back to the original "progressive" anti-trust era: Every time their own policies produce a cluster-fumble that can't be covered up, why, "the free market has failed." And the remedy is: their policies, times two. Or three. Or ten. Over the past several decades we've labored under a socialism-fascism that has become ever more concentrated, ever more intrusive, ever more distortive, and ever more deadening; but that matters not. For statism cannot fail in principle. Only freedom can fail in principle. The only thing that "democratic" socialism ever needs is some occasional tinkering.

The useful thing about a pronouncement that "we're all socialists now" (even if it's meant ironically) is that it takes us right down to premises. The intelligentsia are prisoners of their bad premises; and, more important, we are prisoners of their bad premises. Even if voting were moral and instrumental, it couldn't get the statists and their statism off our back. One thing Ayn Rand was right about (and she was right about quite a few) was that we need a full-scale intellectual revolution, all the way down to the level of premises, before we have a hope of firing up the necessary revolution in politics and economics. In fact, if an intellectual revolution succeeded, we wouldn't have to do any more firing up.

Now, as we have pointed out before in The Last Ditch, our civilization has reached the stage where such a revolution is no longer in the cards. But whether it's the least we can do or the most we can do, we have to try to reach the reachable, teach the teachable, and keep it from ever becoming literally true that "we're all socialists now." [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

Arch-neocon William Kristol and Patrick Buchanan, hammer of neocons, turn out to have a hero in common — one who may surprise those who believe that Buchanan is a paladin of freedom and think that his support for protectionism is a fluke.

Kristol on "Fox News Sunday," October 12, 2008: "Alexander Hamilton is the founder of democratic capitalism in America."

Buchanan on "Morning Joe," MSNBC, October 6, 2008: Alexander Hamilton was the "architect of the American economy," and "Hamilton's my hero."

In contradistinction, libertarians have always considered Hamilton — in the words of Roy Childs — "the Stalin of the American Revolution." And that's so even if one believes it is obscene to imply, even within the analogy, that Washington or Jefferson was our Lenin.

On the important matter of Hamiltonianism and the foundation of American fascism, Kristol and Buchanan are virtual comrades in arms.

Buchanan uttered his praise of Hamilton in the context of a panel interview with Tom DiLorenzo, the libertarian economic historian whose latest book, Hamilton's Curse, is nearing publication. Buchanan fiercely attacked DiLorenzo's negative view of Hamilton, while saying that he liked one of DiLorenzo's books on Lincoln. He didn't specify which one, but they all attack Lincoln, and here's the interesting thing. Hamilton's High Federalism led to American Whiggery, and Whiggery led to Lincoln Republicanism. They are all the same ideology, at its various stages of evolution through history, and that ideology has achieved its full flowering as the current American imperial-fascism.

Pat Buchanan, the brave historical revisionist and noninterventionist, really doesn't understand that? Paleos of the Buchananite stripe are never going to be friends worth having until they cure at least this one big blind spot. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

You and me both, Citizen Neff. I mentioned to Ronn Neff the other day that I'd seen some coverage of an anti-Columbus Day movement at Brown University, and I told him I was surprised that such a reactionary, racist, genocidal observance as Columbus Day still had a place on the calendar of any Ivy League school.

Neff replied: "Strakon, I'm surprised to wake up each day and discover we still don't have a base-10 system of months and weeks. ('Is it Thermidor yet?')" [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

Remember, you're supposed to call it a "rescue," not a "bailout." After all, who could oppose a "rescue"?

It's not a "bailout," anyway, because the government stands to profit from it in the end!

If that is so, I say let's go to complete, undiluted socialism in all areas. Totally abolish all markets. Wouldn't that be the way to really pile up those "profits"? (For the government, that is. Not for us, of course.)

I'm no economist, but if I had one on hand, I'd ask him whether Bastiat's "Broken Window" insights might somehow be relevant here, along with Mises's argument that economic calculation is impossible under socialism — i.e., in the context of forced exchanges, using stolen money, that never would have occurred in a true market. [Modine Herbey]

Black magic, scary mojo. I too feel the urge to ask an economist some questions. In particular I'd like to ask a free-market economist about the "mark-to-market" accounting rule that the SEC imposed on financial institutions in January, which had the effect of shredding much of the dicey paper they were holding. Foes of "mark-to-market" blame it for killing Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, among other things. Here's a brief account of "mark-to-market" by "BoomerJeff," writing at LibertyWorks: "Bailout Update: SEC Changes Mark-to-Market Rule."

According to "BoomerJeff," the SEC has now ditched or at least softened "mark-to-market." That being so, am I wrong in assuming that some of those mortgage-backed assets will, in fact, start looking pretty good — just in time for them to land in the government's grubby paws? If that's so, then the government may actually be able to claim a profit — thanks to a series of machinations that will make the incantations and rituals of a voodoo priest look as simple as an EXIT sign.

What a scam! How could Strakon's Dark Suits have let this be done to them? [Henry Gallagher Fields]

Editor's note.  "BoomerJeff" was wrong about the repeal of "mark-to-market," according to financial news reports and commentary. The rule was still in place, and still much lamented, as of early February 2009.

It all depends, Hank, on whether those valuations rise before or after that grubby-paw-landing occurs. Note that the relief from "mark-to-market" was announced before the actual Bailout took place (assuming it is going to take place). The Dark Suits may yet make out. They usually do. (I realize that this does not address the fatalities that have already occurred among my gentlemen of somber garb.) [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

Bad weather and steep roads. One of my co-conspirators here at TLD recently took a road trip to the mountains of North Carolina, and he got caught up in the gasoline shortage that, week after week, continues to afflict parts of the American South. He's back home now, with an amusing explanation for the shortage that he picked up while in Asheville.

For their part, the established media have been blaming hurricanes, refinery bottlenecks, and the like; but they haven't been amusing me as much as driving me crazy. Such factors might explain why the price of gasoline in affected areas would rise, in a free market; that is, they might explain changes in relative scarcity. But they could not explain an actual shortage. They could not explain why the market failed to retain equilibrium between supply and demand, at whatever price was necessary to clear the market.

A sharp rise in that price, by the way, would be the best way to ensure that gasoline suppliers exerted all efforts to frantically shove increased supplies into the affected area — eventually allowing the market to clear at a lower price. It would be the best way because it is the market way — the social way — freedom's way.

My vacationing friend heard the usual chatter about bad weather, but here's the funny bit. Word on the street in Asheville, it seems, is that gasoline trucks are having difficulty making it up the region's mountain roads. Apparently the roads have suddenly gotten steeper, just as "greed" suddenly worsened on Wall Street some time ago, as financiers abruptly switched from their traditionally altruistic personae, quite lacking in the acquisitive impulse.

Well, that's the state of economics education in this country, for which we can thank the schools and the mainstream media, among other culprits.

At lunch on Sunday, I asked my economics-professor sister whether she didn't think that the gas shortage in the South had resulted largely from state-level anti-gouging laws and regulations. She thought it was a dead cert. But I shouldn't have had to ask a professor. Anyone with a little understanding of economics should have been able to tell me that when we see not just a change in relative scarcity but an actual shortage, government has once again rushed in to help us with our problems.

You won't hear that from the MSM, but it took me only a minute's Googling to find an intelligent article, at JohnLocke.org, that lo and behold deals specifically with the Tarheel state: "N.C. price-gouging law promotes gas lines, shortages / Government interference hurts state's consumers." What do you want to bet that similar interference — sorry, helping — has caused the shortages in Tennessee, Georgia, and the other affected states? [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

A little street theater. I am compelled to share some comedy recently recounted to me by a longtime racialist friend. He was walking down the street in a liberal white neighborhood when he encountered a group of older white women wearing Obama T-shirts and fluttering around a card table festooned with Obama posters that they had set up on the sidewalk.

As he approached, he broke into a broad smile. "I'm so glad that Obama is running," he gushed. "I'm so glad that an African American is finally going to be our president!"

The biddies beamed at him and offered applications to register to vote.

"I'm already registered," he assured them, "and I can't wait to vote for Barack Obama. I've been waiting for this all my life. This has been my dream."

As their expressions approached ecstasy, he moved in for the kill:

"I know you all remember back when we finally got rid of that awful Ian Smith and put the white people in Rhodesia in their place, and made Robert Mugabe president of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has made so much progress under Mugabe! I do so hope that Barack Obama turns out to be America's Robert Mugabe!"

Their smiles disappeared instantly, to be replaced with expressions of utter hatred — not, of course, directed toward Mugabe.

My friend smiled broadly at them all and then walked away. I am so jealous! I wish I had thought of this myself! [Douglas Olson] (October 1, 2008)

I'm running out of popcorn! Yesterday I almost posted some comment on the failure of the bailout bill, but it got out of control and I didn't finish it. I'm glad.

I figured that whatever I wrote stood an excellent chance of being overtaken by events within a few days, but it took only two days for what happened in the House on Monday to be revealed as little more than theater.

1) Speaker Pelosi brought a big important measure to the floor "without knowing" whether she had the votes to pass it. "Foolish incompetence!" cried the established-media commentators. "Try to imagine Sam Rayburn doing such a thing! Or Tip O'Neill!"

2) Before the vote, Pelosi and Rep. Barney Frank (chairman of the Finance Committee) made partisan, anti-Republican speeches on the floor. Why, that wasn't the way to Bring Us Together! "Foolish incompetence and uncontrollable Red Guardism!" cried I myself, rashly, in e-mail messages to some co-conspirators.

3) Pelosi stayed out of the chair after the clock expired — ostensibly working the floor to get a few members to change their vote — and a few minutes later Frank demanded, "Regular order!," which prompted the chairwoman to smack the final gavel on the bill, certifying its defeat. It was nice for Pelosi — nicely convenient — that she didn't have to do that smacking herself. And all the cognoscenti cried out that Frank had made a freshman parliamentary mistake: "What was he thinking?"

4) On Tuesday, the Republican hard men protested that what Pelosi and Frank said had had no effect on their voting. They voted on principle! And media commentators — turning on a dime — pooh-poohed the effect of the speeches, too: All the refuseniks knew how they were going to vote long before Comrades P. and F. opened their traps.

5) After the vote, despite the Grave National Emergency, the House stuck with its plan to adjourn for the Jewish holidays. That puzzled Joe Scarborough, the Republican ex-congressman who hosts MSNBC's "Morning Joe." He pointed out that while he was in the House, "we worked through Good Friday" when urgent and important business was pending. Well, I'm not too sure whether any Christian holy day holds a candle to Rosh Hashanah in the eyes of the System, but it was peculiar to see congressional Jews close down the House and — so it seemed — leave in the lurch all those Jewish financiers up in New York. Even Comedy Central's Jon Stewart — himself a Jew — thought it was weird, pointing out that there are many more Jews on Wall Street, proportionately, than in Congress.

Though I fell, momentarily, for some of the other playacting, I smelled something false in this one. It seemed to contradict so much of what Kevin MacDonald has written.

6) We hear now that when the House comes back into session, it's going to pass a bill reinforced with "sweeteners." The Senate is expected to pass a "sweetened" version this very evening (Wednesday, October 1).

We are witnessing real tension in the ruling class and in the political class that has been designed to serve it, but it's not the sort of rivalrous tension that we saw in the Yankee and Cowboy War forty years ago or that we currently see between the "moderate" Dark Suits and the Bush Likudniks. Rather it is the tension of alarm and danger.

In pursuing their own specialized financial interests within the nightmare web of regulations, distortions, and privileges they themselves are ultimately responsible for — given their dominant influence over general policy formation — the Dark Suits have in effect blinded and crippled themselves in the process of blinding and crippling the rest of the country. I keep saying that the Suits just haven't been the same since 9/11. George W. Bonzo has made me miss good old Bill Clinton, and now I miss the good old Suits, too. You never know what you've got 'til it's gone.

Well, I go too far. But, really, the ruling class has so badly fumbled and bumbled its own special business that it is very difficult, now, for its hirelings in Washington to save it from itself while at the same time retaining their own offices. Hollowed-out though it may be, and always inherently fraudulent, Duh-MOCK-risy still formally exists in the United State. It's not too important for the Dark Suits if pols are turned out of office, though a mass kill would involve considerable training costs for the replacements. But keeping their current job is very important for the pols themselves, and they're dancing and prancing across hot coals right now in a frantic effort to make it through November 4.

Excuse me: I'm heading to the lobby for another tub. With extra butter. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. He and I might disagree on various plot points, but one man I'd really like to be watching this movie with is Walter Karp.

The established-media commentators I heard on the telescreen Monday, including the financial commentators, were all aghast at the initial failure of the bailout. One thing in particular they all agreed on was that the last thing we wanted to see was any standing on principle by House members who oppose socialism. (For purposes of argument only, I'm stipulating that some other members do join Dr. Ron Paul in opposing socialism on principle.) In other words, principles and political philosophy are diverting topics to chat about while we sip scotch in the evenings, but it's senseless to pay attention to such fripperies during a Grave National Emergency.

It reminded me of leviathan's standard line about how we mustn't pay any attention to civil liberties during the Emergencies leviathan reliably creates. (Abraham Lincoln, Our Greatest Tribune of Freedom, seems to have pioneered that dodge.) In fact, adherence to civil liberties and libertarian principle in general are never more important than during leviathan's serial Emergencies. Our ambitious rulers know that all too well, but their bodyguard of liars work overtime to keep it secret from the sheeple. [NS] (October 1, 2008)

Once again, it's all the fault of "laissez faire"!

• Obama "senior advisor" Stephanie Otter, on "Morning Joe," MSNBC, September 15: "If there's anybody to blame for [the Wall Street cluster of error], it's the laissez-faire economics of the last eight years."

• John McCain on "Morning Joe," September 16: Wall Street has "broken the social contract between capitalism and the average citizen and the worker." If the reference to a "social contract" isn't smelly enough, another thing to wrinkle your nose at, here, is McCain's belief that ordinary people do not themselves participate in "capitalism," i.e., the market. In fact, even in our totalitarian time, when it comes to keeping body and soul together the overwhelming majority of Americans spend 90 percent of their time participating in the market. (I believe Sheldon Richman once made that point to good effect.) McCain went on to propose more and better regulation.

• Mitt Romney on "Morning Joe," September 17: "No one believes in no regulation" of Wall Street. Well, except for those evil laissez-fairists who were in charge until the last week or so! Romney, of course, is the "business expert" among the Republicans. What I take from what he said is that we, and the folks at Mises and Future of Freedom and FEE, and Robert Higgs, and all the other free-market people are — "no one." From the standpoint of the System, I guess that's about right. [Nicholas Strakon]

Dark Suits ripped. It's a commonplace, at least hereabouts, that the more the Central Government fails, the more powerful it gets. On the basis of recent events, we can confidently extend that rule to cover the ruling class standing outside the official regime. The more the Dark Suits fail at their own specialized financial business, the more powerful they become.

To be sure, as specialized entities operating in the market, they have suffered damage, and their weaknesses have been revealed anew. But entities that are weak with respect to the entire political-economic System are not able to induce the Central Government to commit ever greater, ever worse crimes on their behalf. The particular men who are the Dark Suits may be clowns or madmen — they may have hoist themselves on a petard they had ignited to destroy others — but the Dark Suits as a class, as a force, are indeed "too big to fail." And their employees in Washington will not permit them to fail.

I need to write about these matters at greater length, once things gel a bit. [NS]

At least since the adoption of the Constitution, America has always had a ruling class standing outside the regime, or at least straddling the divide between officialdom and formally private entities. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries it based itself on government land grants. Those remained important for a time, especially with respect to the railroads as they developed, but protective tariffs and other interventions soon established additional bases for extra-regime rulers; and it became somewhat unusual for actual officials of the regime also to be senior members of the ruling class.

Now it is possible to propose that the American system — at the highest levels of finance — is taking giant steps from its traditional fascism toward straight socialism. It will be interesting to see how long the true ruling class can remain even formally separable from the official regime. The structure may be changing at a level more fundamental than Strakon has deemed possible. At least it's a possibility worth entertaining. [Henry Gallagher Fields]

Irony, typically delicious. Whatever is happening, it's big and bad. How wonderful that it's happening during the presidency of a Republican who at one time was touted as a conservative! [Modine Herbey] (September 22, 2008)

"Lipstick on a pig," indeed! I find that to be a dazzlingly apposite way to describe the moronic fraud of American electoral politics. (I think the Sage of Baltimore wrote a little on this subject.)

For benefit of readers bold and vigilant enough to avoid all news coverage, I must report that on September 8, Barack Obama used the phrase "you can put lipstick on a pig" in the course of criticizing John McCain's positions, and the McCain campaign responded by claiming that Obama was denigrating McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, as somehow porcine. Palin, you see, had identified herself as a lipstick-wearer in her acceptance speech at the convention.

Palin's speech occurred recently enough that it did not fall under McCain's interdict on discussing "history," for which he has explicitly expressed contempt. McCain himself used the phrase "lipstick on a pig" last October in slamming Hillary Clinton's proposals, but that, of course, does qualify as "history," so it is irrelevant according to the McCain philosophy.

Now, I've been known to grumble about my beloved fellow Americans' devolving into "sheeple" who just beg to be gulled by the worst sociopaths in the country, and honestly I am afraid that we are heading toward an age of idiotocracy when we'll either have to accept some major Asian intervention to swab out our collective throat or risk drowning in our own spit. You can't destroy a country's culture, including its family culture, and its educational industry without putting a major dent in people's ability to think and to run their own private lives. And you can't erect a leviathan both vast and microscopically intrusive without rendering a people heedless, unable to plan, and present-bound. Infantile, in short.

But a radical divide still exists between the habits of mind that people exercise when they walk into the voting booth and those that they exercise when they walk onto a used-car lot. The media are properly pointing out the transparent untruth of the McCain attack, but they take it for granted that some voters will swallow it. I take it for granted that they're right.

If most voters brought at least average intelligence and average self-respect to bear on campaigns and elections, the "pig" lie alone would destroy McCain. The Republicans have exhibited a contempt for ordinary Americans that has managed, at least temporarily, to exceed that of the Democrats when they disseminate their goofy socialist propaganda denying the laws of justice, cause and effect, and simple arithmetic.

But voters do not employ normal cognition when meditating and acting on electoral politics. They have no incentive to do so, and really they can't do so, since voting is silly, incoherent, and inutile. (It's also immoral for a free man, but that's a subject for another day.) A "responsible" voter has to try figuring out 1) whether a pol is telling the truth about his intentions and 2) whether the pol will be able to do what he promises if (mirabile dictu) he is truthful. And all in a context where one is more likely to influence the weather by dancing nude in his front yard than he is to influence an election by voting.

Attaching oneself to the cause of some pol — who, let's face it, is just a character on TV for 99 percent of voters — is a species of what I like to call "statish thinking." Try using a similar kind of cognition when doing business at Friendly Sam's Pre-owned Auto Paradise. You'll wind up helping Friendly Sam — with $10,000 of your money straining his pocket — push your newly purchased junker off the lot. [Nicholas Strakon]

Speaking of what should destroy a candidate, anywhere but here in Bizarro World, a couple of Sarah Palin's statements certainly fit the bill, as uttered during her September 11 interview with ABC's Charles Gibson.

A partisan of NATO expansion — one of the nuttiest, riskiest, and most counterintuitive ideas our rulers have dreamed up since the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. — Palin admitted with little apparent reluctance that if (Caucasian) Georgia were a member of NATO and were attacked by Russia, America "perhaps" would have to go to war with Russia. And she said that "we [sic] are friends of Israel, and I don't think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves, and for their security." That had to do with the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Well, no responsible, patriotic American would want to second-guess any such attack — yes? — despite its nightmarish implications for the U.S. Empire's current adventure in Mesopotamia. (Transcript.)

So now we know, and what a relief! If McCain and Palin are elected, we'll have yet another team of objective, impartial, honest brokers in place to sort out quarrels in the Muslim world and in Russia's "near abroad," all in the genuine interests of the American people.

Seriously, the thing is this. Unlike the "pig" lie, which is a little bold even for American campaigns, Palin's support for crazed foreign adventurism puts her right smack in the American political mainstream. Support for such outlandish policies won't destroy her or any other candidate licensed by the System, even though the policies themselves may wind up destroying us.

You know you're living in Bizarro World when mainstreamers are the extremists, and extremists are the ones urging caution, restraint, and ordinary good sense. [Henry Gallagher Fields]

You want sexism? I'll give you sexism. Veep candidate Sarah Palin should drop off the ticket, resign her job as governor of Alaska, return to her troubled family, and focus on her most important work — being the mother of her children.

I include among her family troubles the deployment of her son "Track," an Army PFC, to Body-Bag Land. Astonishingly — and disgustingly — Palin seems happy and proud to see him go.

Let's see. If he gets himself KIA before Election Day, will that help or hinder Palin's chances of becoming vice president? No doubt that talking-point has been staffed, just in case, and the handlers have been incentivized to effort for a favorablizing spin in the target demographics.

More noteworthy than Palin's defaulting on her responsibilities as a mother is conservatives' resorting to the "sexism" charge in response to Democrat criticism of Palin. Young Christians make a similar spectacle of themselves when they have themselves tattooed with portraits of Jesus and listen to "Christian" heavy metal. The medium is the message. People have lost all sense of proper idiom, and, along the way, all sense of how degraded they've become.

It's disconcerting enough to hear modern conservatives add Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy to their list of political heroes (alongside Ape Lincoln), but over the past two or three decades conservatives have actually started stealing the lingo of the Red Guards. In the present campaign they're using it gleefully as they angle for political advantage. And many, I'm sure, are sincere as well as gleeful as they level the dread charge of "sexism": that is, they have absorbed the Red Guards' lesson that there are no inherent differences between men and women — except, of course, that women are superior in all respects to men.

For the hundredth time, I invite those who consider themselves to be part of the Right to meditate on exactly what it is that conservatives are seeking to conserve. [NS] (September 2008)

It's serious business, but you've still got to laugh. According to the September issue of American Renaissance, the special tendency of black and brown folks to commit crimes extends even to ... wait for it ... "hate crimes"! At least that's the case in Los Angeles County.

Citing a report by the L.A. County Human Relations Commission covering 2007, AR reveals that "on a per capita basis, Hispanics were about 20 percent more likely to commit a racial hate crime than whites, and blacks were more than twice as likely." AR notes that "Hispanic-on-black was the largest 'hate' category, followed by black-on-Hispanic."

That's not all. Two separate anti-white activists in California (both Jews, it seems) blame the colored "hate crimes" at least partly on ... wait for it ... racist whites! However risible that is, for some reason I don't feel like laughing any longer. ("Still Blaming Whitey," p. 16) [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

The politics of ADD. As soon as Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate, the McCain campaign started running an ad that quoted Biden saying negative things about Obama, back when Biden was a presidential hopeful.

And that's great. Biden's job, now, is to depict Obama as the greatest statesgod to come down the pike since, I don't know, Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Satan or some similar goblin; and the McCain ad helps illuminate the systematic deceit, if not sociopathy, that is inherent in politics. If we were supposed to believe what Biden said about Obama then, why should we believe what he will be saying now? And vice versa.

But less than 24 hours after the first ad appeared, the McCain campaign started running another ad that quoted Hillary Clinton saying negative things about Obama, back when Mrs. Clinton was a presidential hopeful. And that, according to the ad, is why Obama didn't pick her as his running mate.

Maybe so, but then what about Biden?

Such open, vaunting contempt for simple logic should render any serious man — any man still operating a live brain — ashamed at having anything to do with these pols and their giant, unending, unholy criminal enterprise. They don't just enslave and ruin us. They insult our intelligence while doing so. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

Luckier than they knew. The lonely partisans of freedom in 1945 had a hard enough time staving off apoplexy as it was, but just think what they'd have had to put up with from the Left and the New York media if Joe Stalin had been diagnosed with brain cancer. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

The "surge" at Belleau Wood. The War Party, with Bombs Away McCain in the forefront, has been trying to embarrass the anti-war movement by claiming that the Bush regime's "surge" of a modest number of reinforcements into Iraq has been a brilliant success in their terms. Obama and the Obamites — who are not anti-imperialists but sometimes try to play them on TV — respond with wonk talk about the "Sunni awakening" and other alternate explanations for the current Happy Days in Mesopotamia. Whatever the truth of that technical back-and-forth may be, I find all of it to be both misleading and irrelevant. Genuine enemies of imperialism and imperialist war need to keep their eye on the ball.

In June 1918, the U.S. Marines led the Wilson regime's "surge" into ground combat on the Western Front by launching the battles of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood. The whole grim and protracted struggle found a prominent place in the Marine mythos, and the institutional memory of the U.S. military in general, as an epic of courage, loyalty, and heroism rivaling even that of Bombs Away when he got himself apprehended and imprisoned for the war crimes he committed in Vietnam.

Officialdom and the veterans' lobby may have exaggerated the importance of the Marines' eventual success, but it does seem to have spoiled the last major offensive that the Germans would be able to mount in France. Now, if the brave Marines' victory played a significant part in the Allies' eventual strategic victory, what did that victory lead to?

Well, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, to name three. And just maybe the Great Depression, too, though other factors were certainly important there.

The United State's very entry into the war was a tremendous crime, and Americans were the first to suffer its depredations. Those who need to be refreshed on the Wilsonian domestic tyranny must consult Thomas Fleming's gripping tale of true-life horror, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I. On any list of the worst presidents to whom the evil dullard George W. Bush may be compared, ranking near the top must be the evil pedant Woodrow Wilson.

I throw out those observations just to suggest that, in discussing tactical or strategic successes, we ought not lose sight of the nature of our rulers' wars. We must understand what success means for those fighting a criminal, aggressive war: it means success in committing crime, and, if history teaches us anything, in clearing the ground for future crime. No amount of ingenious generalship and derring-do on the part of Our Boys (and Wymyn) can change that. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

Obama abroad. Like Strakon, I'm still rooting halfheartedly — quarter-heartedly — for Race Commissar Obama over Field Marshal McCain, but I hope that the Young Imam's traveling thousands of miles to deliver his treacly sermons to foreigners just destroys him so far as self-respecting Red Staters are concerned. Much as I hate to say anything favorable about Bombs Away, I thought it was a nice touch for McCain to appear at a German restaurant in Ohio at the same time Obama appeared in Berlin. And more than that: it was a hundred times more of an American thing to do than what Obama did. But as Strakon has pointed out, Obama is a virtual foreigner.

Sad to say, that foreignness is probably appropriate given the office he's seeking, namely, that of Emperor of the World Except for Russia, China, and a Few Other Unenlightened Places. It's bad enough — and badly significant — to see incumbent U.S. presidents giving speeches abroad, but to see a presidential candidate doing it just nails down the fact that the United State is an empire. Not that any further proof is needed; for at least sixty years now it's been pretty easy to figure out. I would say a hundred and forty years, but I don't want to come off as some kind of radical.

It's still a bit odd: the preaching to foreigners who can't vote for Obama. Legally, it is still the case that actual U.S. citizens must elect a president, even if creative authorities in some localities stretch that rule. Apparently Obama and his gang are hoping that the foreign glory won by their hero will reflect back to his benefit at home, impressing United Statians who are capable of being impressed by that sort of thing. As I suggest above, I'm hoping they've miscalculated badly with respect to Middle Americans. But Middle Americans continue to disappoint on many fronts — as they send their sons and their daughters to fight in Bush's War — and I'm afraid that many six-packers in non-Commie flyover territory will now conclude that Obama would be an emperor strong and wise: just what's needed to Keep Us Safe and Defend Our Freedom in Strange Places.

Alternatively, if the Obamites have miscalculated, then the ruling class will just have to accelerate its forty-year campaign to — as Bertolt Brecht put it in a parallel context — dissolve the old people and elect a new one. [Henry Gallagher Fields]

Comment. I think Mr. Fields is on to something when he writes of Obama's overseas appearances reflecting back on his political fortunes at home. Whether or not those appearances directly impress American voters, they satisfy the transnational ruling class, which owns and operates the apparatus for impressing, manipulating, deceiving, and otherwise motivating the voters. Obama's jumping through hoops in foreign countries helps make him Palace-worthy in the eyes of his, and our, true masters. Naturally he would not have achieved his status as nominee-designate had they not already recognized that he was malleable — but he must still perform his public obeisance. A capo who has faithfully served the Godfather for decades must still be seen to bow and kiss his hand.

In minimizing the importance of the voters as independent actors, I'm thinking of what James Burnham wrote in one of the formulations of his that I love to quote: "The existence in [democratic] society of the suffrage machinery naturally tends to favor those individuals who are adept at using the machinery; just as, in a society where rule is founded directly on force, the ablest fighting men are favored against the rest." (The Machiavellians, 1943)

The title character in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War," played by Tom Hanks, puts it less formally when he tells a friend that "I'm not elected by voters; I'm elected by contributors." In a lapse into realism (if not crimethink) that is astonishing for Hollywood, the Wilson character goes on to make it clear that his biggest contributors are Jews, even though almost no Jews live in his district. He explains: "I'm one of Israel's men on the Hill."

In terms of that specific context, Obama's appearance before AIPAC and his visit to Israel were surely more important, for purposes of bowing and hand-kissing, than any of his visits to European countries. [Nicholas Strakon] (July 2008)

Distracting Mr. Wright. Here in Trantor driving to work is often an ordeal of traffic jams, long stoplights, and other hazards such as gigantic SUVs piloted by morons simultaneously reading e-mails on their Blackberries — all of it made worse by the restrictions forced on us by the traffic-control Ms. Grundys. Then, once you make it to work, there's the problem of finding and paying for a place to park.

However, for some people, there's an alternative. We have a number of paved bicycle trails, most of them on U.S. Park Service land. I sometimes ride on them to work. Most have little yellow dashed lines in the middle, just like a real road, even though the trails are only about 5 feet wide. They also, and I am not making this up, have "STOP" and "YIELD" signs at intersections with other trails, making them resemble the little roads in Legoland, or somewhere.

At intersections with roads, the trails feature not only stop signs but also notices ordering the cyclist to "Dismount and Walk Bike." That makes a lot of sense, because it's much easier to get out of the way of speeding cars if you're hobbling across an intersection on your bike cleats.

Of course, the bicyclists contemptuously ignore those ridiculous intrusions and do what they think best. That's despite the fact that a large proportion of them are insufferably "Green," believe they're saving the planet by biking to work, and support all kinds of state intrusion for the good of all.

But now even this partial refuge from the traffic prudes is under attack: on one of the trails, the Authorities are installing speed-limit signs. For bicycles! From now on bikers on the Capital Crescent trail are restricted to 15 miles per hour, which isn't much more than my 80-year-old mother can grind out on her three-wheeler. And they're enforcing the limit with radar and $50 fines. I really am not making this up.

The next step? How about speed limits on sidewalks? Stop signs in the corridors of buildings? And perhaps they should fine the owners of Frisbee-playing dogs that run too fast in public parks. The possibilities for creative do-goodism are endless! [David T. Wright] (July 2008)

"Be glad  'bout the jihad!" A lot of people are doing it — including ultra-respectable, racially terrified whites in the MSM. On July 18 it was Dan Rather's turn, during a guest appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show. Commenting on the Reverend Doctor Doggerel's latest case of foot-in-mouth disease, Rather sent his own oxford wingtip mouthward by stipulating that "Jesse Jackson was an important figure in paving the way for an Osama bin Laden to appear."

However mortified, the panel members let the remark pass without correction — namely, Zbig's daughter Mika, columnist Mike Barnicle, and the Negro "Tiki" Barber, who apparently is some sort of retired sports figure.

Barack Obama may actually win in November, but, still, this is just the sort of thing the Democrats should have expected when they chose a virtual foreigner as their candidate. [Nicholas Strakon]

During the same installment of "Morning Joe," Mr. Barber supported the position of Miss "Whoopi" "Goldberg" — as delineated on the televised hen-party "The View" — that while it is a dreadful thing for most whites to use the word nigger, it is a fine thing for Negroes to use it. Showing remarkable liberality, Mr. Barber allowed that some white athletes, insofar as they are on terms of locker-room familiarity with their Negro brethren, may properly use the word in certain contexts.

It is useful for us whites to receive such instruction, from time to time, on Negro policy, but I should have been even more grateful had Mr. Barber gone on to explain when, if ever, it is appropriate for Orientals or Hispanics to employ the traditional language. One suspects that the question is especially pressing with respect to our friends from south of the border. [NS] (July 2008)

The road to fairdom. One of the media's feminist operatives recently asked old Bombs Away whether he thought it was "fair" that health-insurance companies paid for Viagra but not for birth-control drugs. Having no analytical ability or attachment to principle, McCain could only try spinning a non-answer answer that would do the least damage to his campaign for emperor, and he failed. The MSM did their best to raise the resulting wave of embarrassment to tsunami levels.

For benefit of those emerging from time capsules, I explain that the feminists, and cultural Bolsheviks generally, consider pregnancy to be a disease — among white women, at least.

Now, from a purely analytical standpoint it is hard to explain why insurance companies do what they do, given the prevailing health-care fascism. But given a free market, if some malcontent asked a principled free-marketeer the "fairness" question the latter might well answer:

That is an incoherent question, unless by "fairness" you mean "a result that I, personally, happen to like." Is it "fair" that a certain road owner rents space along his right-of-way for giant billboards? Is it "fair" that McBurger doesn't limit its menu to broccoli and oat bran? Is it "fair" that recording labels sell more popular music than unpopular music?

You are free to tell the untold millions of people acting on their ever-changing personal preferences in society that you find the result of their decisions to be "unfair" or otherwise unpleasant. You are free to try to persuade them to your way of thinking. But perhaps I should remind you: You are not free to forcibly replace their preferences with your own.

Apparently, demand in the competitive marketplace has induced the health-insurance companies to cover erectile dysfunction as a disease and has discouraged them from covering pregnancy as a disease. "Fairness," as a general and fatally foggy principle, doesn't come into it.

Why they're winning and we're losing. The Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL) is a nonprofit organization that serves "gay" youth in the Washington, D.C., area by reinforcing their feelings of homosexuality, promoting their alienation from normal society, and encouraging them to participate in "safe" sex.

In recent months, according to an article in the homosexualist Washington Blade, the group has lost five of its top officials, either through resignation or dismissal. SMYAL also lost about $70,000 in grant funds from the State of Maryland AIDS Administration, money that was supposed to be used for HIV-prevention services in the state's public schools — because the work was not being done. Other lost funding includes a $25,000 grant from the D.C. Children's and Youth Investment Trust Corp., $20,000 from Sasha Bruce Youthwork, and $15,000 from something called "Break the Cycle."

A significant setback for the homosexualist forces? Well, stop and think about the larger context. In all, SMYAL has been operating its propaganda and support services on about $1 million a year, and the reductions represent a loss of only 13 percent of its total budget.

One metro area. One organization promoting homosexuality. One million dollars a year.

Wouldn't it be awfully nice to know that somewhere in the world — or everywhere in the world combined — dedicated people had resources of $1 million a year to champion the cause of white rights and the very survival of the white race? [Douglas Olson] (July 2008)

One side only, as usual. Over the past few days MSNBC has reported that Iran's missiles can reach Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arabian Peninsula. Naturally the missiles can hit targets next door in Iraq as well, including the tempting bull's-eyes that the U.S. Empire has thoughtfully pasted onto the map of that satrapy in the form of big bases.

In the coverage I've seen, the threat to Israel has garnered the most attention.

Given Iran's recent test-launches, I understand why their weapons are the focus of the current missile stories; but I'd expect a free, independent, unterrified news medium to include some background information on what countries Israel can hit with its missiles.

Since free, independent, unterrified news media are thin on the ground here in the Utopia of Democracy, I offer these links, at the risk of promoting crimethink:

"Israel's Nuclear Missile Threat against Iran," by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya at Global Research

"Israel: How Far Can Its Missiles Fly?," The Risk Report, Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, June 1995

[Nicholas Strakon] (July 2008)

Succinct wisdom about "white privilege." In the Fall 2007 issue of The Occidental Quarterly, reviewer David Wilson carries out an appropriately concise demolition of Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege by Robert Jensen, an anti-white white. Addressing "that weakest item in the anti-white left's concept bin, 'white privilege' or 'institutionalized racism,'" Wilson writes:

That a white person might receive better reception in a predominantly white society is as natural a proposition as to say that a penguin will thrive in icy waters or a palm tree in a tropical climate. To accept it as morally deficient requires a belief that the group existence of whites itself is morally deficient or in need of obliteration. (p. 124)

The truth at last. President-for-Life Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has acknowledged that he will not respect the result of the June 27 run-off presidential election if he loses. "We fought for this country, and a lot of blood was shed," Mugabe declared recently in a state-controlled newspaper. "We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint [pen] fight with a gun?"

Many of us knew thirty years ago that Mugabe was fighting not for "freedom" but for personal power and plunder. This latest news will be totally ignored by those who called us "haters" for perceiving the truth while they were willfully deceiving themselves. [Douglas Olson] (June 2008)

Don't you wish we had an energy policy? As the fuel crisis deepens, many commentators — typically but not exclusively left-wing — have started crying for the Central Government to adopt and impose an "energy policy." They maintain that "we" have not had an "energy policy" for many years.

I am reminded of the Left's repeated insistence that the current system of crushing, totalitarian socialism/fascism amounts to "laissez-faire capitalism."

No energy policy, eh? The long-running ban on offshore drilling doesn't qualify as such a policy, it appears. Nor do the thousand other interventions by Red Guards — tolerated by anti-competitive Dark Suits — that have sabotaged petroleum exploration, extraction, and refining. Also not qualifying are the Guards' suppressing the nuclear-power industry and the fascists' distorting that same industry through regulation, monopoly privilege, and risk-subsidy.

Likewise, the existence of a Strategic Petroleum Reserve doesn't qualify, or oil leases on land the government purports to own, or the inequitable awarding of special tax privileges to Big Oil, or the entire combustible mixture of regulation and subsidy extended to the industry decade after decade. (I am all in favor of tax exemptions, but they do amount to special privilege when they are restricted to certain sectors and not offered to all tax-victims.) The catastrophic subsidizing of ethanol doesn't seem to qualify as an energy policy, either. I could go on, but I will relent.

What true, sincere leftists mean by an "energy policy" is a gleaming, triple-riveted, unitary, utterly totalitarian system designed and run by them. The existing plethora of state interventions — chaotic, corrupt, and contradictory — has been produced bit by bit by pols thinking only of the next election, bureaucrats building their own empires, militarists seeking secure fuel supplies, and corporate fascists bidding for privilege. And it drives our coercive utopians crazy.

What I mean by an "energy policy" is no policy. Or, rather, no state policy, a state of affairs that would allow each of us to have our own policy with respect to peacefully creating, selling, buying, and using energy. In other words — and they're words that you've seen before in these pages — Smash the state. The only utopian thing about that is that we can't seem to get there from here. [Nicholas Strakon]

A related column by Strakon: "Global warming: What if the Left is right?" (October 27, 2007).

(June 2008)

Professor McCain and the Hoosier schoolmistress. John McCain is now offering to school his young competitor, Barack Obama, during a joint trip to Mesopotamia that Bombs Away is proposing. Let's take McCain at his word for a moment, even though the idea is just a political ploy in bad faith.

Wasn't it McCain who, in Baghdad a year ago, toured what he termed a "safe neighborhood" in Baghdad while wearing body armor and being escorted by heavily armed U.S. troops and helo gunships?

Wasn't it McCain who, shortly after returning to the United State, sang the version of "Barbara Ann" in which he threatened the Iranian people with bombing, thereby earning his indelible nickname?

Wasn't it McCain who, touring Iraq this year with his minder Joe Lieberman, repeatedly revealed his confusion about the various groups resisting the Empire in that country?

And was it not McCain who, when Obama declared that Bush's War opened up Iraq to al Qaeda, replied, "That's history — that's the past — that's talking about what happened before." Apparently, if McCain does have some teaching ability, it does not apply to the teaching of history.

One is permitted to wonder just how much McCain has learned during his little forays of globe-trotting and, therefore, just how much he would be able to teach the Young Imam.

I don't think such plastic-bubble globe-trotting has much educational value in any case. In 1985 I spent a couple weeks in Europe, including several days in Switzerland. Owing to a bizarre upgrade in our accommodations, my group of weefolk wound up staying at the Hotel Intercontinental in Lausanne, overlooking the lake and sharing the public areas of the hotel with oil sheikhs and their mistresses. That was another kind of plastic-bubble tourism, and upon returning to these shores I resisted the temptation to represent myself as an authority on all things Swiss, though I did lecture everyone within earshot about how the Swiss knew how to cook a steak and the French didn't. But maybe I'd have been bolder if I'd had a Lieberman with me, or some political generals.

On our bus, by the way, was an Indiana schoolmistress who, in retrospect, reminds me a little of old Bombs Away in terms of her perspective and openness toward learning. I must emphasize that, in what follows, she was not trying to be a comedian. When we disembarked on the outskirts of a preserved Mediaeval village that straggled up an incline, the lady opined, "They ought to knock down some of those buildings so the bus could go up the hill." And as we were wending our way along mountain roads, coming into Switzerland, with the Alps shouting their magnificence all around us, she commented, "Far as I'm concerned, they can give this country back to the Indi'ns."

Maybe McCain should seek out that lady and make her his running mate. Who knows: she might advise him to give Iraq back to the Iraqis. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

TLD Golden Oldie. In observance of War Celebration Weekend 2008, I invite readers to refresh themselves with this piece by senior editor Ronn Neff from 1999: "What was the 'greatest generation'?" (May 2008)

Perpetual war for perpetual jobs. I recently watched the movie "American Gangster," starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and one line of the script has stuck with me. Washington plays a major Harlem drug gangster, and Crowe plays the head of a special narcotics unit across the river in Jersey. The story is set in the late '60s through the mid '70s.

Crowe's character is a "good cop," along the lines of Serpico, and he enjoys a notoriety paralleling Serpico's among his corrupt or indolent colleagues. At one point, grousing to his boss about his unit's failure to extract cooperation from other agencies, including the feds, he comments:

"You know, I don't think they want this [the illegal-drug industry] to stop. I think it employs too many people. Judges, lawyers, cops, politicians, prison guards, probation officers ... They stop bringing dope into the country, about 100,000 people are going to be out of a job."

I wonder what that job-loss figure would be now, thirty-some years later, if our rulers abandoned their Drug War? Very much greater, I'm sure.

One might hope that the loss of state power would be very much greater, too — but it is likely that much of the damage the war has already inflicted on our liberties is permanent. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

Sorry, Holy Pair, you can't have it both ways. For normal Americans — however few they may be — the Democrats' cage-match for the Emperor nomination has been full of entertainment on the P.C. front, as we've heard Hillary partisans repeatedly shriek, You can't say that about her! She's a womunnnn! and Obama partisans repeatedly wail, You can't say that about him! He's half-Africannnn!

It's been fun, but now, as I expected, the Obama forces are starting to lay down the special rules and restrictions that they want to enforce against Bombs Away McCain and his supporters in the fall campaign.

As you know, in one of her campaign appearances Michelle Obama confessed a lack of pride in her country during the dark time before her spouse started his ministry for its redemption. GOP forces in Tennessee duly posted a mildly critical Internet spot juxtaposing La Obama's lack of pride with the stout national pride of good ol' boys in the Volunteer State — whereupon the Rev. Dr. Obama responded by telling Republicans: "Lay off my wife." (ABC News, May 19, 2008) He added, "When you start attacking family members, there's a lack of decency there." And he characterized the attack, mild and indirect though it was, as "detestable."

In truth I'm not quite sure whether that qualifies as P.C. or not. Actually it comes off as rather patriarchal, but then the whole feminist "I Am Woman — Hear Me Whine for Special Protection!" thing is shot through with contradiction. In any event, this absurdity I do not find so entertaining.

If Michelle Obama or Chelsea Clinton or — for that matter — Bill Clinton doesn't want to come under attack from political rivals, that family member should, er, not make political speeches. Could anything be plainer? I am amazed that anyone, even in the degraded mainstream media, took the Young Imam's complaint seriously.

That's especially so in light of the fact that the ABC story blandly goes on to report: "Michelle Obama denied reports that she had personally ruled out considering Clinton as Obama's vice presidential running mate." The Obamas rose to no dudgeon, high or low, at the suggestion that little nonpolitical Michelle, so frail and so meek, might be in a position to decisively influence her husband's political machinations. Instead, La Obama praised Hillary, declaring that "there is no way that I would say absolutely no to one of the most successful and powerful and groundbreaking women on this planet." From that, we are entitled to conclude that Michelle could say no if she wanted to.

We'll have to wait and see whether the Obama forces observe the rule they've laid down for Bombs Away when it comes to the possibility of their attacking Mrs. Bombs Away, multimillionaire replacement wife and ex-babe Cindy McCain. I'm sure she knows of some closets where certain skeletons are hanging, even if she didn't help hang 'em there. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

Who runs America? Following the death of Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) in February, Howard Berman (D-Calif.) succeeded him as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Lantos, a Hungarian-born Jew, was famed as the "only Holocaust survivor in Congress," even though there were no "death camps" in Hungary. He was actually a petty, cowardly bully who routinely abused witnesses at hearings, once going so far as to compare a witness to a Nazi, and then using his power as chairman to forbid the man from speaking a word in his own defense. A few years ago Lantos ran his automobile over the foot of a child in a Capitol parking area and fled the scene rather than stop and own up to his misdeed.

He was, of course, lionized as "brave" and as a "humanitarian" when he finally ceased polluting the planet with his presence. Berman, like Lantos, is Jewish. He is followed in seniority on the committee by Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), also a Jew. Then come Eni Faleomavaega, the non-white, non-voting delegate from American Samoa, and Donald Payne (D-N.J.), a Negro.

Next in the pecking order is Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a Jew, followed by Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), another Jew, and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), yet another Jew.

One has to go down nine places in the original majority membership list to find the first white Western man — Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), who is closely followed by Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), a Negro, and Diane Watson (D-Calif.), a Negress.

I don't think much else needs to be said. The cold, hard facts speak for themselves. [Douglas Olson] (May 2008)

Yankee president, stay home. Don't fall out of your chair, now, but I have to agree with the Squirrel-Monkey-in-Chief on something. If elected, Barack Obama should not go abroad to talk with adversaries of the Empire. I have to agree also with partisans of Tibet: George Bush himself should not attend the Summer Olympics — but not just because the Games are in Beijing. Moreover, Americans should not have tolerated Bush's traveling to Israel or to any other foreign country.

If I were still a constitutionalist republican, I'd favor a constitutional amendment prohibiting a president from leaving the national territory of the United State while in office. Woodrow Wilson was the first to do so, if you don't count Abraham Lincoln's visit to Richmond, Virginia, in April 1865. Franklin Roosevelt started the real globe-trotting, during World War II. He even went all the way to Tehran and Yalta to conspire with his beloved comrade, Uncle Joe.

Please note that I have just named the three men whom I consider to have been the worst American presidents. All of them were major founders of the U.S. Empire — in Lincoln's case, the unitary continental empire.

Such an amendment would not have prevented the rise of the Empire — as an anarchist, I maintain that pretty pieces of paper, or even parchment, ultimately cannot prevent anything — but it might have erected a few inconvenient hurdles for the empire-builders in the Presidential Palace. And it would be a very good thing, even in our desperate state during this darkling time, if the emperor were somehow restrained from leaving the country.

Ideally, of course, we wouldn't have an emperor in the country, either. By the way, there is plenty in the Constitution that would have prevented that — if constitutions really worked to restrain the power-hungry ladies and gentlemen responsible for enforcing them. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

She's melllltingggg! Nicholas Munchkin of TLDville hopes it's not premature to make a joyful noise:

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up, you sleepy head.
Rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.
She's gone where the goblins go,
Below – below – below.
Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong, the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!

(May 2008)

There's obscene, and then there's obscene. The New York Times recently unleashed its propagandists to bemoan a sharp increase in the use of Food Stamps — one of the most openly obscene welfare programs because it was designed not to feed the hungry but to keep American farmers prosperous by increasing the purchase of food. Stop and think: Why else would it have been created by two farm-state legislators — Bob Dole (R-Kans.) and George McGovern (D-S.D.) — instead of by inner-city (code word for black) pols?

"Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices," writes Erik Eckholm of the New York Times, "the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s." ("As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record," March 31, 2008.)

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

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

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

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

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

The Times and the actual state of the economy notwithstanding, couldn't those machinations have something to do with the increase...? [Douglas Olson] (May 2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would seem that only two relevant questions remain:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[March 2008]

If millions of acres worldwide are converted from growing food to growing corn for ethanol, is it not a virtual certainty that at some point we shall hear the Left screaming that there are famines and people dying from hunger because of the West's insatiable demand for — or "addiction to" — ethanol?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," I replied.

"You going to?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I am."

"Why you not vote?"

"I don't believe in democracy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 1, 2007
Another Swastika Reported at GWU

November 3, 2007
Another Swastika Appears at GW

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

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

[Douglas Olson] (December 2007) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annapolis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huckabee replied:

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

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

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

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

Wallace dropped the matter and went on to something else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— and simultaneously —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In an interview with CNN on October 4, the Commandant revealed that this isn't the first time that nooselike horrors have shaken the Coast Guard Family. For example, a hapless CG member recently generated a noose in the course of a "knot-tying exercise." One assumes that was inadvertent, but the Commandant said that the poor fumble-fingered schmuck still came in for "counseling." You can't make this stuff up.

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 October 1 that a middle school in suburban Chicago has banned public hugging among its students. Apparently something called "hug lines" were developing in the halls during class breaks, and as the reporter put it, the school was seeing "so much hugging it was making students late for class." Here's an account from cbs2chicago.com: "Oak Park School Bans Hugging," by Mike Puccinelli.

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 September 20 aiming to intimidate the local judiciary in a case involving Negro thuggery, and while watching the news coverage I detected some movement on the Hate Crime front. This is an evolution that all liberty-lovers should keep track of.

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 September 21, in the nearby town of Alexandria, La., where many of the protesters had their motel rooms, police stopped a pickup truck with two (empty) nooses hanging from its tailgate. And again our adversaries expressed the hope that Hate Crime charges might ensue — or at least a charge of inciting a riot. In the event, the teenage driver was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, but this incident should remind us of the danger to our liberties that has always lurked in the "inciting" charge. Given the present climate, it alone may have the power to free Hate Crime from its dependence on real crime, allowing the former to stand by itself as a new and sharper tool of tyranny. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

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 9/11 national self-pity orgy is now in full swing. At the Pentagon, a giant spotlighted Imperial flag hangs on the wall, now reconstructed at enormous taxpayer expense, where the jetliner plowed into it six years ago.

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."

That's the kind of razor-sharp thinking we're subjected to when it comes to 9/11. Take the "Freedom Walk" participant interviewed on the local TV news: "We have to remember that we were attacked! We were attacked!" he said excitedly. No kidding. And ... so? That justifies killing a bunch of people and ruining the lives of millions more who never did anything to us? Or what?

In all the chest-thumping about 9/11, where is the sorrow about the lives lost? At the beginning of Sunday's walk, the Air Force band played Sousa's "Washington Post March" — hardly a dirge, or even a piece that would encourage meditation or contemplation.

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....

***

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) 
 

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