www.thornwalker.com/ditch/stopcollection_2017.htm
 


 

Stop and think,  collected — 2017

Note. Because of changes in the archive pages, over time, you may find that some of the links you hit to other "Stop and think" installments actually lead nowhere. If you encounter frustration with a particular link, please feel free to hold my feet to the fire. — Nicholas Strakon

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The new tax bill is law, and that's bad enough. What's almost as bad is that it was promoted by Republicans, conservatives, and power-wonk libertarians who thought they were doing us a favor by talking like liberals and denouncing deductions for certain state taxes as "subsidies" to high-tax states.

Now that they've swallowed that camel, how will they keep from swallowing all the gnats that the Left will toss their way about other deductions? Whom are they subsidizing? Will those be subsidies that we should get rid of as well?

A friend of mine recently said that nursing anger is like drinking poison and waiting for it to hurt your enemy. The same may be said of envy. [Ronn Neff] (December 2017)


Who's kiddin' who? History-minded readers will be delighted to learn that statesmanlike municipal rulers have implemented an ingenious solution to the unperson-statue controversy.

Hang on. That is a bitter joke.

As you may recall, Strakon has pointed out that the abolition of state "property" would allow unpopular statues and their sites to fall into the hands of actual owners, that is, private owners. In May 2017, he wrote:

In a property society ... [w]e would find such controversies expressed in the media and on the letters-to-the-editor page, in boycotts, advocacy advertising, or even demonstrations (on the property of cooperative owners). In such a society, controversial monuments, despised by some and cherished by others, would sit on actual property, not government "property." Attacks on them would be seen, properly, as crimes — trespassing, destruction of property, theft — and professional security forces would protect them. If the owners of the monuments flagged in their defense, or in their upkeep, then better-motivated people could step up and offer to buy them and, if need be, the property surrounding them. Or they could offer to relocate them.
Good stuff, if Strakon does say so himself. And — mirabile dictu! — it turns out that a group of city politicians have recently relinquished to private owners some property they controlled, places where massively incorrect statues have been standing. Great news, right? Now we're getting somewhere!

But, alas, no.

Here's the story, as forwarded by Ronn Neff: "Statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest are removed from Memphis after city sells parks," Associated Press and Reuters, December 21, 2017.

And now for the insult added to the injury: "The parks were sold to Greenspace Inc. for $1,000 each, The Commercial Appeal reported. Memphis Chief Legal Officer Bruce McMullen said Greenspace can legally remove the statues, which the city was unable to do."

The newswriters explain: "Selling the parks to a third party was a way to get around the Tennessee Historical Commission, which had previously denied the city's petition to take the statues down."

As Neff commented, "$1,000 for a park? 'Who's kiddin' who?'"

And Strakon commented back: "Brilliant. Yet another pathbreaking application of Polite Totalitarianism. Libertarians, including me, have called for ending the government 'ownership' of such sites, and what do our adversaries do? Cut sweetheart deals with simpatico outfits technically outside the state apparatus!"

However clever it was, the scam did not go entirely unrecognized, according to a USA Today article appearing in the Commercial Appeal:

Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Lee Millar ... said he thinks the Sons — an organization dedicated to preserving Confederate history that has opposed the city's efforts to remove the statues — will file a lawsuit by the end of the week.

Sons' attorney Doug Jones earlier in the day said the entire operation "bordered on anarchy." [Ha!] Greenspace was a "sham" nonprofit that "ripped off" taxpayers by buying the parks for $1,000 each and then illegally removed the statues, he said.

According to that story, "The nonprofit was created in October after [its president Van] Turner approached City Attorney Bruce McMullen with the long-bandied-about idea to buy the parks to remove the statues." Purpose-built, in other words. Now, we don't know whether Greenspace is controlled by radicals or not — we haven't dug into it — but we can be sure that "normie" conservationists would also remove the statues. The entire tale should remind us of one important truth about our masters' strategy: once you've seized control of a country's general culture and remolded it, almost everything else, in time, will follow. [Nicholas Strakon and Ronn Neff] (December 2017)


Senator Franken and Aristotle. Five women have now accused Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) of sexual harassment.

In my previous S&t observation, I mentioned the senator's remarks on the first accusation that he wasn't exactly sure how that incident could have happened.

I supplied the answer: Practice, Al. Lots of practice.

When it comes to vices and virtues, Aristotle had it right: it's a matter of habit. [Ronn Neff] (December 2017)


The Daily Caller reports: "Study: Satellites Show No Acceleration in Global Warming for 23 Years" (by Michael Bastasch, November 29, 2017).

The report itself is here.

Does this mean that all that anti-CO2 legislation can be repealed? Naaaah.

What this report proves, Scientifically ('cause we all believe in Science, right?), is that the legislation passed before 1987 has WORKED! It's got to stay in place. Who knows what would have happened if it hadn't been passed?!

And, you know, maybe there's something we can do that's even better. Because (let's say it together), "There's more to be done." Even when we don't need to do anything. [Ronn Neff] (December 2017)


In the new tax bill, some taxes are reduced, and some deductions are repealed. Do the calculations, and you will learn that some people will pay less in taxes, and some will probably pay more.

But there are two things that are certain about taxes, and you don't need any calculations to understand them: (1) Eventually taxes will go up; and (2) you will never, never get those deductions back. Never. [Ronn Neff] (December 2017)


Al Franken says, "I need to be much more careful and sensitive in these situations."

Does that mean that next time he'll make sure there's no camera around?

He also says, "I've thought a lot in recent days about how that could happen." "That" in this sentence means "groping women." May we make a guess that may help him understand? "Practice, Al. Lots of practice." [Ronn Neff] (November 2017)


Thanks to Al Franken, John Conyers, and Bill Clinton, we can say with certainly that Roy Moore is eminently qualified to serve the American people in Congress.

He'll fit right in. [Ronn Neff] (November 2017)


A little noticing from Virginia. In 1993 Bill Clinton (D) became president. Later that year, Virginia elected a Republican governor. Clinton was reelected in 1996.

In 2001 George W. Bush (R) became president. Later that year, Virginia elected a Democratic governor. Bush was reelected in 2004.

In 2009 Barack Obama (D) became president. Later that year, Virginia elected a Republican governor. Obama was reelected in 2012.

In 2017 Donald Trump (R) became president. Later that year, Virginia elected a Democratic governor.

I'm just sayin'. [Ronn Neff] (November 2017)


At The Unz Review, Ron Unz has challenged the blackout of TLD on the Net once again, as he did some time ago in reposting articles by Steve Sniegoski that were first published here.

This time Mr. Unz has reposted Ronn Neff's magnificent essay, "Libertarians are inherently anti-Semitic and racist / And there's nothing they can do about it," posted here at TLD on October 17.

Mr. Neff's essay is one of the two lead articles for today on the Review's home page. The direct link to the essay at the Review is here.

Kudos is due Mr. Unz. Two well-known libertarian sites I invited to repost the article didn't even favor me with the courtesy of a reply. That, I'm afraid, is par for the course. [Nicholas Strakon] (November 2017)


Reflexive references. Texas Governor Greg Abbott appeared on Fox News today in connection with the Sutherland Springs church massacre. Among other things, he talked, briefly, about confronting evil throughout history.

He mentioned the evil perpetrated by Hitler and Mussolini — yep, Mussolini — and then referred to unspecified evil doings in ancient times.

So even this Red State Republican, when pouring conventional rhetorical ketchup over a situation, as pols do, didn't think to include on his short list of evildoers Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or any other champion vast-murderer among the communists. Men who made Hitler (let alone Mussolini!) look like pikers.

The clichés people rely on can tell us much about the intellectual culture in which they swim. [Nicholas Strakon]

Related reading: "Guardians against thoughtcrime: Dictionary dictators," by Ronn Neff, September 1997, posted June 4, 2002.

"But Strakon, you didn't say anything profound about the massacre itself!"

Oh. Sorry. It's not as if I haven't said it before, at greater length, but here goes:

At the end of civilization, evil monsters proliferate and stalk the land. [NS] (November 2017)


The Kellogg's Scandal: More questions pop to the surface. The Washington Post, always in the forefront in reporting on the burning questions of the day, has revealed to the nation a shocking story of hidden racism in a cartoon of anthropomorphized breakfast food on the back of a cereal box. It seems that the only janitor in the scene of romping Kellogg's Corn Pops is more darkly colored than the rest.

Kellogg's, of course, rushed to correct the offense. But the damage had been done to the psyches of millions of hapless Corn Pop-consuming American children, who must now undergo a thorough regimen of re-education to rid their brains of the subliminal message that darker Corn Pops are somehow inferior to the lighter-colored ones.

Now, far be it from me to second-guess the august Washington Post, but I must point out that the story raises a lot more questions than it answers.

For instance, is the "Corn Pop" in question really a Corn Pop? It's wearing clothes, while the others are not. It has a nose, while the others do not. The others have little leaves or something growing out of their heads, while the "brown" one does not. And if it is not a true Corn Pop, is it some other species of cereal? And how should that be interpreted in light of the requirements of Political Correctness?

Also, note that the yellow Corn Pops are all naked, and some of them are in postures that would be considered obscene if they were human beings. Why are they not wearing clothes? And what are the implications of the fact that the Corn Pops seem to have no genitals? Does that mean they have no gender as well? Come to think of it, that can't be true; because anyone's gender, of course, is not at all related to zir genitalia — or, by implication, zir lack of them.

After a more complete perusal, a troubling picture begins to emerge. One Pop seems to be getting ready to throw a baby Pop off a balcony. Others are behaving in similarly abusive ways to infant Pops, while still others are engaging in risky, self-harming, or even suicidal behavior. My own experience with cereal in milk suggests that frolicking in a fountain, for instance, is deeply self-destructive behavior for any kind of cereal breakfast food.

Other distressing behaviors include hanging by one hand from a high balcony, riding a snowboard down an escalator handrail, and, in one case, popping a balloon on which an unsuspecting Pop is sitting — no doubt to result in a fall which will cause serious injury. And the implications of "Uncle Willy's Corn on a Stick" don't bear thinking about.

The overall picture is so disturbing that one is led to wonder: Is the Kellogg Company conducting some kind of twisted psychology experiment? Are the Corn Pops prisoners in some kind of giant rat maze or Skinner Box? And why is such pathology considered appropriate to be shown to children?

In any case, it is clear that Kellogg's has a lot more to answer for than mere racism. Perhaps a congressional investigation is in order. [David T. Wright] (October 2017)

Somewhat-related reading: "Trick or Treat, Hear Them Bleat," by David Cole, Taki's, October 24, 2017.
 

The System's willing helpers. The neighbors threw a birthday party for their 9-year-old granddaughter the other day. They are such good neighbors that I was willing to overlook the "Gore 2000" signs in their front yard in 2000 and the "Kerry for President" signs in 2004. (By the way ... if we'd gotten Gore in 2000 or Kerry in 2004, would it have spared us Obama in 2008 and 2012? Would that have been better or worse?)

As is the case with most outdoor events these days, loud music was played at the party. Again, I can make allowances. We were in what were probably the last really nice days of the year — sunny, mild breezes, not too chilly — the outdoors in the middle of the day is the right place and time for loud pleasures.

But I happened to notice that one of the songs being played for this birthday party — this birthday party for a 9-year-old girl — was Ed Sheeran's "The Shape of You," a song I know only because it is played over and over at the McDonald's where I used to meet Joe Sobran and still meet David T. Wright. This song says that "my bedsheets smell like you" and has the refrain "I'm in love with your body." I myself thought that loving "all the many charms about you" in 1928's "Embraceable You" was almost crossing the line of decency.

Are we all really supposed to believe that it's a good idea to plant such refrains in the minds of 9-year-old girls? And the boys? Is that how good parents want boys to be thinking about their daughters? Why would good parents and grandparents ratify the corruption carried out by the public schools? Why not just start issuing a Golden Books edition of Fifty Shades of Gray? [Ronn Neff] (October 2017)


The true face of the State. Emma Goldman, the American anarcho-communist who lived around the turn of the last century, once remarked famously, "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Recent events in Spain show that she was exactly right.

Many of the people of Catalonia, a province in Spain, do not want to be a part of that country. They want to be independent. So the provincial government decided to hold a referendum, to let the people vote on whether Catalonia should be independent or not.

That's Democracy, right? The People vote, and their voice is heard?

Well, no. The central government of Spain declared that the vote could not be held. It was "unconstitutional" because they had not given permission for it. Think about that for a minute. A "democracy" that doesn't allow people to vote!

The Spanish king explained why in almost perfect Orwellian terms:

"All this means is that they [the Catalan regime] have attempted to appropriate the historical institutions of Catalonia and these authorities in a clear and definitive way and they have put themselves outside the rule of law and democracy.

"They have tried to break the unity of Spain and national sovereignty which is the right of all the Spanish people to decide democratically."

So, Catalans can't vote democratically to be independent unless the rest of Spain allows them. That's Democracy.

When the Catalan regime went ahead and held the referendum on October 1, the Spanish authorities did what the State always does when faced with a threat to its power: it used force to try to shut it down. They bused in Guardia Civil thugs from other parts of Spain. The Guardia are Spain's version of France's Gendarmes and Italy's Carabinieri: militarized cops.

Here is the real face behind the mask of the benevolent modern "democracy."

More than 900 people were injured by the brutal riot cops, who fired rubber bullets at peaceful would-be voters, stomped them, and beat them with yard-long billy clubs.

The enthusiastic brutality of the Spanish police against law-abiding civilians contrasts starkly with the lackadaisical treatment by the French Gendarmes of the thousands of Third World invaders still infesting Calais. It's almost as if both forces were concerned with something other than keeping peace and order. [David T. Wright] (October 2017)


American collectivism runs deep. Interviewed October 5 on Fox News about Donald Trump's visit to Las Vegas, Mike Huckabee stated that the president represents all of us, and more than that: he is the repository of all our feelings, which he is carrying with him.

Strikes me as not just a collectivistic sentiment but one verging on the theological.

Are those activities enumerated in the Constitution among the president's duties? Joe Sobran might have something to say about that, if he were still with us.

In any case, I can't remember communicating my feelings to Mr. Trump, or telling Mr. Huckabee anything about whom I might have assigned to carry them various places.

Imperial presidency? This goes well beyond that. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2017)


Independence NOW for oppressed colonial Puerto Rico! [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2017)


This should scare the hell out of everyone. You may be familiar with the ridiculous rent-seeking by Boeing in getting a 220 percent tariff imposed on Bombardier airliners. Because Bombardier (based in Canada) is being "subsidized." As if Boeing itself were not getting massive subsidies from the United State. I ask you.

Anyway, here's the scary part. Apparently Boeing can "turn off" the aircraft it sells to you. That has raised the possibility that Boeing might "brick" the military helicopters it has sold to Britain if Britain, which has a Bombardier factory in Ulster, retaliates against the tariff. The Daily Mail reports:

A former four-star officer told The Times: "Boeing owns the data. You buy the data.

"You rely on the original equipment manufacturer for the key to the data, servicing and upgrades. They can turn the fleet off."

The Ministry of Defence is planning on purchasing 50 Apache AH-64E helicopters and nine P-8 maritime patrol aircraft — which are built by Boeing — from the US government.

The department already uses around 60 Chinook helicopters.

Okay, so what if a bunch of British military helicopters don't fly? What's it to me? Well, one possibility it raises is that hostile hackers could ground an entire air force, which is interesting and actually rather appealing.

But here's the thing. John Deere, maker of agricultural tractors and other equipment, now forbids owners to repair the tractors they have bought without using a certified John Deere representative.

That means that if you have a John Deere, you can't repair it yourself, or hire an independent repairman, without waiting for a JD rep to come around and give you the electronic authority to make the repair. According to Motherboard,

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

Thank God for the black market and Eastern European hackers, then. As you might expect, rogue repairmen are running around with software (cooked up by Ukrainians) that makes it possible to fix your tractor without John Deere's official blessing.

But you can bet that John Deere is working hard to prevent that from happening. And how long will it be before some machine you own, such as your car, is subject to the same kind of control? Repair costs would skyrocket. And if you missed a payment, would they take a page from the electric company and shut off your service?

Moreover, seeing how Google and other web entities are so enthusiastic about shutting down people who don't think the correct things, is it so hard to imagine that thought criminals might one day have their everyday appliances shut down because they had violated something in the fine print of their user contracts? [David T. Wright] (September 2017)


New Steve Sniegoski piece recently posted at the Unz site. Have you forgotten about John McCain? No, no, not that he's a hellish villain of war, empire, and destruction — you're not likely to have forgotten that! What I'm wondering is whether you've forgotten, as I had, that at one time he was less crazy-evil when it came to imperial affairs. In a recent posting at The Unz Review, Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski reminds us of "McCain's Transmutation from Cautious Realist to Super-Hawk." A fascinating examination, which I highly recommend to your attention. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2017)


Taylor Swift offends the self-anointed. I'm the first to admit that I don't keep up with popular culture, or whatever passes for it these days, because it bores me to tears. So I wasn't aware that there are new terms of abuse for white women used by blacks: "Pinky" and "Becky."

It seems that pop celebrity Taylor Swift is an example of both, because she released her new album on the 10th anniversary of some black woman's death: "Taylor Swift Is Releasing Her Album on the 10th Anniversary of Donda West's Death, and Black Twitter Is Not Pleased," by Michael Harriot, The Root, August 25, 2017.

Or actually, I guess, Miss Swift was already a "Becky," which apparently refers to pretty white women whom black people don't like.

I'm not familiar with any of the people or idioms mentioned in the post (not even, believe it or not, Miss Swift), so I don't understand what the people quoted are talking about. What I do understand is the contempt and venom they have for white people. None of them has anything substantive to say. It's all just snarky ad hominem abuse.

The Root is an affiliate of the Red Suits web mouthpiece Salon. So the raw hatred expressed is not an example of a marginal or fringe attitude. It's how the black Left elite looks at whites. They hate us because we're white. They hate our white skin, they hate our white behaviors, they just hate us. And of course, none sees any contradiction in calling those of us who object to such bald, overt racism "haters."

Of course, the really terrifying thing is that the white elite have aligned themselves with these vicious black supremacists, to permanently marginalize poor and middle-class whites, and so destroy once and for all their declining traditions of self-reliance, independent thought, and distrust of authority, now caricatured and vilified under the epithet of "Whiteness."

Now I know how the Jews felt in Germany before the war. [David T. Wright] (August 2017)


Charleston gunman acted without hate, telepathic mayor and police say. That's my headline, not Fox's, but it's based on Fox's reports. At the time FNC was reporting the story on air this morning, it was still unknown whether anyone had been hurt or even whether the restaurant standoff had ended. But the cops had already announced that whatever was occurring, it wasn't a "hate crime." Now the mind-reading mayor has detected similar emanations from the psychosphere.

According to the on-air coverage, the gunman is black. That detail has now been scrubbed from the story, though reference is made to the Dylann Roof church massacre, which occurred nearby.

More like the old Soviet Union every frackin' day ... [Nicholas Strakon] (August 24, 2017)

Update, August 28. Take a look at James Fulford's comments at the end of this post at VDare. As Ronn Neff likes to say, it's always worse than you think.

Speaking of that, comrades, get a load of this, from the Daily Caller: "CNN: Everyone Who Voted for Trump Is a 'White Supremacist by Default,'" by Henry Rodgers, August 23. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2017)


Notes on the purge.

It transpires that Antifa also attacked some journalists in Charlottesville. That is not getting much play because — just as the Alt-Right supports the police who pushed them around — left-wing journalists cover for and support Antifas who punched them and destroyed their equipment.


CNN's Kate Bouldan told a conservative guest who was defending himself against her implicit accusations, "Stop talking. Stop talking. Stop talking for a second. You're the guest on my show." (It occurs at about 12:40.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the point of having a guest on one's show to let people hear what he has to say? And since when is that the way to treat a guest anyhow? (The answer to the second question is: Ever since the hooligan Left took over the government, the media, and academe. It is typical of the Left to shut down and shout down adversaries in discussion. Indeed, their political philosophy and their ethic make it mandatory.)


When did the Alt-Right lose the propaganda war? They — along with the Old Right, the New Right, the paleocons, and the Tea Party — lost when they allowed the political spectrum to be defined in such a way that Nazis and Constitutionalists were on the same side. Even the neocons now in power suffer from that identification.

The identification was underscored when the only states Barry Goldwater won in 1964, other than Arizona, could be stereotyped as racist hold-outs, and when opposition to the welfare state became branded as racist, which means that the libertarians are also tainted.

There is no winning against this enemy until those identifications are shattered. And there are no "right people" who can be elected who will shatter them. Think about it: Even the combined power of Ayn Rand, William Buckley, and George Will was insufficient to shatter them.


It's about time. Al Sharpton has finally given us a clear look at what it means when whites lose their country: he has called for the defunding of the Jefferson Memorial.

Surely it's only a matter of time before His Holiness will call for a renaming of the city in which the Jefferson Memorial is to be found. After all, its namesake also owned slaves. (TLD would applaud that effort, by the way. We have long offered the name "Trantor" as a suitable substitute.)

And maybe, once his brain overheats from thinking about it, Sharpton will call for a renaming of Harold Washington Memorial Park in Chicago. I mean, isn't it an outrage that old Harold went around sporting the name of a slave owner? [Ronn Neff] (August 2017)


Charlottesville: Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem. In a video of the Charlottesville protests of August 12, one of the Alt-Right men can be heard calling to the police, "We support you guys!"

A few points:

(a) The police are agents of the state.

(b) The state is the primary force-agent of compulsory reverse-discrimination and the destruction of monuments. And the West.

(c) The propaganda machine of the state is far more powerful and extensive than the few YouTube videos the Alt-Right can produce.

(d) If the Alt-Right wants to "support you guys" they are supporting their own defeat.

(e) The Alt-Right still thinks we live in a basically okay society that can be fixed by getting the right people in office. They therefore — despite what the media say about them — "play nice."

But there is no "play nice" with this enemy, because we have lost, and it is determined to destroy what remains of the West. This is not a counsel of despair, but the acceptance of reality, which acceptance can form the basis for a different kind of undertaking. Unlike the days of the so-called civil-rights movement, society is not dominated by an overall sense of decency and "fair play." Police tactics, and even their uniforms, testify that today we live in a police state. Once the Alt-Right realizes that, they will begin to fight a different kind of battle. You fight differently when the war is not over from how you fight when you have been defeated.

Virgil put it into the mouth of Aeneas the night Troy was being burned to the ground: "The only hope for the defeated is to fight without hope." [Ronn Neff] (August 2017)


Independence NOW for oppressed colonial Guam! [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2017)


On Google's sacking of thoughtcriminal James Damore. Left-libertarians — out to lunch as usual — are criticizing Tom Woods for deploring the Cultural Bolshevik atmosphere at Google, asking whether he now opposes the verdict of "the market." After all, Google is a private company, and is free to set personnel policies and hire and fire anyone it likes!

Let's look more carefully at the state of that freedom.

People who think they can still sharply distinguish between practice and expression, in terms of what leviathan allows, ought to keep this in mind: the practice of "racism" and "sexism" — as defined by our rulers — is against the law in this country; and since identifying "practice" necessarily involves government mind-reading and scrutinizing of expression, the "anti-discrimination" laws are a direct threat to freedom of expression and an invasion of it. In effect, they trump the First Amendment. The wall has been breached. There's no way around that so far as I can see. The only question is how bad it's going to get.

The Central Government has used employers as its most important income-tax-collection arm since withholding went into effect during Roosevelt's War. Largely as a result of that same war, most working people also find their health insurance all tangled up with their employment. Now we see leviathan using employers, indirectly, to suppress dissent. For what company can ignore crimespeak among its employees? Especially if it's a company that does business with the government?

Polite totalitarianism reigns, but as time goes by it's looking less and less polite to me. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2017)

P.S. Hat tip to longtime TLD partisan D.R. of Michigan for the observation that prompted me to write this.

There is more to be said, of course, on the question of why almost all big companies are now dominated by the Left.


It's like a disease. Imperialist thinking, I mean. The Washington Post yesterday quoted Donald Trump on Venezuela:

"They have many options for Venezuela — and, by the way, I'm not going to rule out a military option," Trump told reporters at his private golf club in New Jersey on Friday evening. "... We're all over the world, and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering, and they're dying. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary."

When asked by a reporter whether this military option would be led by the United States, Trump responded: "We don't talk about it, but a military operation, a military option is certainly something that we could pursue."

Now, I refer above to "thinking." As usual, it's impossible to tell what Trump is really thinking. What, or whether. And this particular threat will probably come to nothing. (I'm somewhat less sanguine about his "fire and fury" blustering at North Korea.) But we must remember that while words may just be hot air for us weefolk, it's different for the Emperor of the West. For him, words are as much a form of action as they would be for Vito Corleone. [Nicholas Strakon] (July 2017)


Remaking. There are actually people who think it would be cool if the next "James Bond" is played by a woman. I assume that she'd be called "Jane Bond." Taking the bait, others have suggested a gay James Bond.

I think they're great ideas. And they have inspired me to offer my own ideas to Hollywood. With any luck, I'll even collect some money if one of them is used.

How about a white female in the lead role of the remake of "Gandhi"? She can be called "Candi."

Or maybe an all-white cast in a remake of "Roots."

How about a gay remake of "The Queen and I"?

Or a gay white female impersonator in the lead for "Miss Saigon"?

Or a remake of "South Pacific" in which the universally hated Lieutenant Cable is played by a black rapper who calls Liat a bitch?

They're all swell ideas, and I know TLD readers can do even better.

The idea of course is that lefties always take existing institutions and change them into something they were never intended to be. (Just look at the Episcopal Church.) It's a lesson-in-action of the Randian insight that evil is incapable of creation, and can only destroy. [Ronn Neff] (July 2017)


Are we to be spared nothing? I've noted before that the elites despise ordinary Americans, especially ordinary white Americans. It's the kind of class hatred and prejudice that calls to mind the stereotypes of the old Russian or French aristocracies' arrogant disdain for the peasant. I think part of the reason is that Middle Americans don't fit the elites' notion of what the workers and peasants should be: oppressed, downtrodden, and looking to their betters for support and guidance. Instead, they tend to be too independent and ornery, with ideas of their own about how to live, what to drive, what to think, etc. That many of them still cling to religion and guns, as a contemptuous former Emperor put it, only makes it worse.

So, what's to be done? Well, besides destroying their capacity for critical thinking through the public day-prison system for children, one can destroy whatever small towns and neighborhoods that remain as cohesive communities. The first effective attempt at this was apparently the forced integration of the Boston public "schools" in South Boston, beginning in 1974. South Boston was just the kind of community that sticks in the craw of the Progressives: lower working class, ethnically homogeneous, with a strong sense of community. The fact that they resented having their children forced across town to associate with violent blacks just proved that they were racists who deserved to be forced to accept it.

Since then the forced introduction of aliens into communities has become a favored weapon of the elites against the white masses. Inviting people from south of the border not only dilutes and negates native culture, it provides cheap domestic help to the elites. The problem is that Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans stay away from some places for one reason or another.

So the answer is to parachute the aliens in: "Romanian immigrants are 'defecating in the streets and cutting off the heads of chickens,' complain outraged residents of a Pennsylvania town," by Daniel Roth, Daily Mail, July 14, 2017.

Of course, these aren't really ethnic Romanians. They're Gypsies, who seem to be proliferating in Trantor, also. I kicked one out of a McDonald's a few months ago when he tried to run a scam on Ronn Neff and me. Apparently Romanian Gypsies are really bad news: primitive, uncivilized, and vicious. But it's okay, because:

According to borough administrator Dr. Richard Martin, they are part of a program called Alternative to Detention set up by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

Part of the program is to give local residents orientation "about who these folks (the Romanian immigrants) are, why they're here," said Martin.

"Basically, we need to come together as a community and work through the issues," he added.

You need to "work through the issues" because you have no say about who gets foisted on you as your neighbor. Especially someone who has been introduced into your community as an "alternative to detention." And, of course, it goes without saying that if you complain about it, you're a racist.

It also goes without saying that the people who perpetrated this outrage will never have to deal with feral aliens introduced into their own neighborhoods. No, such blessings are only for those without power and influence. [David T. Wright] (July 2017)


Post hoc ergo propter hoc? We can't tell for sure just how effective the TLD Prayer Group's efforts with respect to Senator McCain have been. We do know that "Prayerful wishes for John McCain" was published before his recent visit to the hospital.

Moreover ... it must be admitted that no libertarian, non-violent strategy has ever yielded such suggestive results in so short a time. We can repeat what liberals often say in a case like this: There's more to be done.

Pray on, my friends! Pray on! [Paul LeMoyne] (July 2017)


Your representatives at work. In the House of Representatives, a suspension bill is one that the leadership considers so uncontroversial that it by-passes normal rules and procedures, which are suspended. From Cato's Letter (a publication of the Cato Institute), Fall 2016, Rep. Justin Amash writing:

"House leaders often pass suspension bills with only a few members present. [They] typically voice vote suspension bills [on the first voting day of the week] in the late afternoon before most members are even back in town. How do they do that without a quorum? Well, if no one is on the floor to object to the lack of quorum, they simply ignore the quorum requirement!"

Keep in mind: the leaders know that they do not have a quorum, which means that they know that what they are doing is illegal, but they pretend that they may take this vote merely because no one objects. Why do they need an objection if they know there is no quorum?

I find myself wondering: When did all you constitutionalists consent to be represented in that way? [Ronn Neff] (July 2017)


Fred Reed is fed up, and he expresses that vividly in this incandescent piece at The Unz Review:

"Oncoming Racial Doom: The Clash of Cultures."

I strongly recommend the column to your attention. It originally appeared at Fred on Everything; kudos to Ron Unz for being willing to repost it, widening its distribution. Many sites on our side of things would have shied away from doing so. The possible penalties for this level of thoughtcrime are severe. [Nicholas Strakon] (June 2017)


A woman called a local conservative radio host the other day and explained why, though she is a Democrat, she did not vote for Hillary Clinton this past November. She said that she was a Christian and just could not vote for someone as pro-abortion as Clinton was. Indeed, she did not understand how any Christian could vote for a pro-abortion candidate.

The host asked the woman, "Who was the last Democrat you voted for?" And she answered, "Obama."

I submit that political action is completely useless unless it can first find a way to overcome this ... what was that delicious phrase I learned a few weeks back? Oh yes ... to overcome this unfathomable pin-headery. [Ronn Neff] (June 2017)


Otto Warmbier. Rightists are beating up on a leftist professor who wrote that Otto Warmbier, the young tourist who found doom in North Korea, got what was coming to him, as a privileged and heedless white boy. Typical compassion and civility from the comrades, yes?

I want to take a different tack — unlike the Reds, I am capable of sympathy — but I still have to be careful about it.

That is to say, I don't mean to blame any specific person when I ask, somewhat despairingly, Didn't the kid know about communism? (He had previously visited Cuba, according to news reports; but then I suppose that may have been a well-insulated Potemkin tour. In any case, Warmbier apparently didn't stray off the reservation during his Cuba visit, bringing himself to the attention of the secret police.) Instead of accusing individuals, I'll accuse the culture in general and — somewhat more specifically — the schools and media in our country for burying the history of communist savagery. American children must hear about Hitler and his crimes ten times as often as they hear about Lenin, Stalin, and Mao and their crimes, although the murder toll of the latter monsters was at least ten times that of Hitler.

I have to wonder whether the typical American student these days hears about the communist murder toll at all. In that context, I have to point out that a dismayingly large proportion of American youths actually seem to be communists.

Enough on that point.

Since Warmbier's death, various politicians have been calling for new restrictions on tourism to North Korea. One of their stated goals is to cut down on the amount of "hard currency" getting to the Norks. Freedom partisans would propose, instead, completely free trade and travel to North Korea — as well as the immediate removal of the U.S. military from South Korea. But that's Libertarianism 101, and I won't belabor it here. It's the pols' other stated goal that's more remarkable, namely, protecting American tourists from harm. Seriously? Now? After what's just happened, the pols think they need to impose further restrictions on where Americans can go?

All talk of rights and liberty aside, unless we really do live in Bizarro World the Norks have just knee-capped their little tourist industry. I've tried not to get mean and personal in this writing, but now it's time: Any American who goes to North Korea now, especially as a tourist, will reveal himself to be an ignoramus, an idiot, or a fantasist. Or perhaps a contemplator of suicide.

A final point. One of the hallmarks of an interventionist foreign policy is the providing of security subsidies — "sanctions," military force, defense pacts, and so forth. The existence of all that apparatus, including the U.S. force on the South Korean frontier and all the naval forces in the region, didn't help Otto Warmbier. In fact, the very existence of security subsidies — the notion that Uncle Sam will spring to the rescue — encourages people, businesses, and organizations to risk trouble abroad.

I hope Americans soon tire of being held hostage in that way by their world-roving countrymen. We have enough trouble right here at home. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Modine Herbey comments. Our American bolshies haven't — so far as I know — attacked Otto Warmbier for insulting the great and glorious democratic people's revolution in North Korea and disrupting the wise and benevolent rule of Chairman Kim Jong-un, who has led the workers and peasants to new heights of prosperity, enlightenment, and blah blah blah. No, the domestic Reds who have opined on the subject have focused on race, "gender," "privilege," and that whole mess, here in the U.S.S.A. Typical of the modern American comrade, and a sign of the times. (June 2017)


A rainy day, epistemologically speaking. My wife got an umbrella for Mother's Day (no, not from me). It had a tag that proclaimed:

"Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects and other reproductive harm."

"Known to the state of California"? Can a state "know" something? Even if it could, how likely would it be that the state of California knew anything? Or should the tag read, "Flunkies of the state of California think/claim/assert/have the power to force hapless Chinese umbrella manufacturers to affix labels to this product"?

And how would the peril become operative? If one ate the umbrella? Punctured or rubbed one's skin with the umbrella? Shot little pellets out of the pointy end at Russian dissidents? Stirred one's gruel with the umbrella?

Inquiring minds want to know. [Edward Morrison Morley] (May 2017)


The attack of the Pope. Lots of libertarians have written responses to Pope Francis's ill-considered remarks on libertarianism. Most of them seem to think that if they can just get him to see that free markets are peaceful and just, and that the minimum wage causes unemployment, he will change his mind. I have held my tongue on this matter long enough, and I address my remarks to libertarians:

Most of you, and many of your primary spokesmen, are atheists. You support abortion, so-called homosexual marriage, putting adopted children in sexually deviant homes, and probably polygamy; and (even if you are not homosexuals yourselves) you support the homosexualist cultural agenda. You advocate the legalization of drugs — and you may hide behind the marijuana-legalization movement, but everyone knows that heroin, cocaine, barbiturates, anti-depressants, and even penicillin fit into your analyses. You oppose taxation of every sort, and even the professed Catholics among you would permit, if they do not actually practice, openly or secretly, birth control and every sexual deviance and casual vice known to man.

It is no secret that Pope Francis is not so different from your neighbors, who also despise libertarianism; like them, he is not a man to make difficult conceptual distinctions. It's not as though he or any of your neighbors is Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, or Thomas Cajetan. So I ask you:

What. Did. You. Expect? [Ronn Neff] (May 2017)


Perspective? Shocking and terrible news from the Washington Post! — "Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador" (by Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe, May 15).

Well, that's a typical Trump-in-the-china-shop blunder, I suppose. At least it's not surprising. But what I wonder is, will Trump's spilling these beans — which are INCREDIBLY, STUPENDOUSLY SECRET LEGUMES! — inflict damage on the American people or people around the world, or on the cause of peace, comparable in any way to ... say ... the U.S. interventionist foreign policy, or Pentagon capitalism, or the NSA, or the taxes required to pay for all of it? Just to name a few minor things. Feel free to add to the list. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2017)


Big Teacher is watching them. Here's another of those increasingly common stories about educationists freaking out over harmless things and visiting terrible penalties on hapless schoolchildren. The headline sums it up well:

"Parents slam Ohio middle school after they suspended their seventh grade son for 10 DAYS because he 'liked' an Instagram photo of an airsoft gun" (by Regina F. Graham, Dailymail.com, May 9, 2017).

Just to be clear, an airsoft gun is a toy.

But you really have to read the whole story for the horror to become clear. The child apparently committed his thoughtcrime at home, on his own time. How it came to the attention of the Authorities is unclear: do they actually monitor the social media activities of their hostages? Or was he turned in by a good little citizen informant?

Those same benevolent overseers do seem to be over-interested in such things: the telescreen report linked from the story above includes a shot of a display at the school in question cautioning students to be sure their social-media posts are "kind, helpful, inspiring," etc.

Of course, like most parents of kids caught in such a mess, those of the penalized child are themselves products of the same day-prison system, and so bereft of the reasoning tools that would enable them to comprehend fully what is going on. The father complained, "He never shared, he never commented, never made a threatening post ... [he] just liked it" — as if such things might have merited the educationists' draconian punishment.

The mother's reaction is even less encouraging:

His mother, Cindy Martin, took to Facebook to express her frustration with the situation. "This sickens me! Not anywhere on the boys Instagram post did it say anything about taking a gun to school. This is a bunch of s*** if I ever seen any....... SMH," she wrote.

"People wake up and teach your children right from wrong and teach them not to blow s*** out of proportion.

"Now 2 innocent harmless boys got in trouble over some pansy cry bag making s*** up!"

On the other hand, her post makes about as much sense as the Official Statement of the Head Child Prison Overseer in Charge — whose name, by the way, sounds like a bad joke:
Russ Fussnecker, the superintendent of Edgewood City Schools, released a statement to WXIX that said: "Concerning the recent social media posting of a gun with the caption 'Ready,' and the liking of this post by another student, the policy at Edgewood City Schools reads as follows:

"'The Board has a "zero tolerance" of violent, disruptive, harassing, intimidating, bullying, or any other inappropriate behavior by its students.'

"... As the Superintendent of the Edgewood City Schools, I assure you that any social media threat will be taken seriously, including those who 'like' the post when it potentially endangers the health and safety of students or adversely affects the educational process."

Yes, of course. The all-important "educational process."

That makes it official: the leftist equation of language and other harmless acts with violence has become enshrined as truth among the pinheads running our children's indoctrination in "citizenship." "Zero tolerance," of course, means no discretion or reasonableness in the enforcement of decrees — a policy well suited to the rule of pinheads incapable of critical thought.

But the real tragedy is summed up by the following:

Cindy shared another post on Facebook after the suspension was lifted and wrote: "Just wanted to let everyone know that the matter we been dealing with over our son 'liking' a picture on Instagram has been resolved.

"Zach is not in any trouble whatsoever, nothing of this matter will be on his school record, it will be like it never ever happened.

"He got to go back to school, he gets to attend his dance and all other school functions.

"I want to say THANK YOU so much to all of our family, friends and all of you who shared our son's story, thank for all of your support, suggestions and kind words, with all of you by our side it made things so much easier to get through!"

So after Mr. Pencilnecker and the others to whom the parents have entrusted their child have revealed themselves to be brain-dead monsters, Mom and Dad are happy to send said child back to the tender embrace of those very same monsters. God knows what other politically correct horrors will be visited upon him as he is further educationally processed. [David T. Wright] (May 2017)


New Orleans: yet another fight over government "property." The Liberty Monument in New Orleans is gone, removed in April under cover of darkness (and police snipers); and the leftist regime of Mayor Mitch Landrieu apparently intends to remove the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard monuments as well — and soon. (As I write, a bill aimed at protecting those monuments is moving through the Louisiana House.)

The Lee Monument was privately funded; the Davis and Beauregard monuments were partly government-funded; and the Liberty Monument was wholly government-funded. But all stand (or stood) on so-called public property. Moreover, in March, a Central Government court declared that it could "find no evidence in the record suggesting that any party other than the city has ownership" of the monuments.

Again we see how government and its "public property" exacerbate social conflict. I enclose the phrase in quotation marks because government, as a criminal organization, cannot actually own property. All property is private property; in fact, the phrase "private property" is redundant.

But as long as government gun thugs continue to defend the legal fantasy of "public property," we will continue to see conflict over the use of that property — sometimes violent conflict. Every week another news story appears describing bitter struggles over this or that issue in the "public" schools, on the "public" streets, in "public" libraries, in "public" parks, or, as here, in the "public" square. Worse, as I've noted before, those struggles provoke people to seek political power in order to defend themselves or to oppress others.

I'm not claiming that social conflict wouldn't occur in a property society. Conflict would surely continue in a land such as ours, riven by a vast crime in its early years: the importation of great numbers of slaves, nonwhite people alien to Western civilization and relatively unsuited to assimilation. Their descendants now have particular axes to grind, particular traditions to honor, and particular villains (white) to abominate. Whatever our political arrangements in the future, the great founding crime will haunt our country until we vanish from history.

In a property society, though, the word "controversy" would be more descriptive than "conflict." We would find such controversies expressed in the media and on the letters-to-the-editor page, in boycotts, advocacy advertising, or even demonstrations (on the property of cooperative owners). In such a society, controversial monuments, despised by some and cherished by others, would sit on actual property, not government "property." Attacks on them would be seen, properly, as crimes — trespassing, destruction of property, theft — and professional security forces would protect them. If the owners of the monuments flagged in their defense, or in their upkeep, then better-motivated people could step up and offer to buy them and, if need be, the property surrounding them. Or they could offer to relocate them.

In any case, I can't envision the monuments being consigned to "storage," which is the current practice of the New Orleans government. Not as long as a significant number of people who cherished them remained in the society.

Property promotes peace. And not only that. Contrary to the careless allegations of certain anti-market paleoconservatives, it also nourishes culture and tradition. For the alternative approach, one might look to Mao, Stalin, the Taliban — or Mitch Landrieu. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2017)


Things we are not allowed to know. From the Washington Times, May 3: "Segment debunking transgenderism cut from [a 1996 episode of] 'Bill Nye,'" by Bradford Richardson.

Episode 19.1.96 refs crimethink sexwise, doubleplusungood, rectify fullwise speedwise. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2017)


Let us consummate the revolution! [Guest opinion.] I am a nice-looking, youngish high-school teacher (of English, if you must know), and almost every year at least one underage girl will make it clear to me that she would like to have sex with me. Or would like to do whatever this generation says isn't sex, but which my father's generation thought was.

I always turn these sweet offers down. I am not eager to lose my job and never be able to work in any school system again except in Thailand. I am not eager to lose my family. I am not eager to go to prison. I am not eager to spend my golden years with neighbors who are warned that a sex-criminal crouches slavering in their midst. And I am not eager to be questioned every time there's an AMBER Alert.

But I do wonder ... I am forbidden by law to enjoy the company of these girls in ways that would be — well, at least not illegal — in just a few short years. This strikes me as age-discrimination. And not only that, but I am required by law to engage in age-discrimination.

The girls are encouraged by law to engage in age-discrimination, since they may cavort freely with lads their own age who may be just using them for rough exploratory purposes, whereas I am gentle and experienced. They are deemed wise enough and mature enough to choose young partners, and (unbeknownst to their parents) to obtain medications and devices to support their cavorting, as well as (also unbeknownst to their parents) surgeries should the medications or devices fail or be left forgotten at a girlfriend's home. But the law wishes them to discriminate against me. Solely on the basis of their age, they are deemed not to be wise enough or mature enough to cavort with me.

Surely, this is a situation that cannot long endure in our discrimination-sensitive age. Love equality will surely make its force felt soon. Perhaps someone from the Cato Institute will take the lead. None of us is getting any younger. [Arnold Zeck] (May 2017)


New Steve Sniegoski piece at the Unz site. World War I is one of my chief historical interests, and I think everyone should learn about the catastrophe and contemplate its results. Our civilization may already have been doomed by the time politicians around the world set it in motion, but the Great War surely advanced our collapse. American entry made the catastrophe even worse, especially with respect to its results, and inflicted a direct and lasting blow here at home on Americans' liberties and fortunes — and, as we have seen, on their very mind.

As it turns out, the neocon Weekly Standard may not be the best source for learning about the war. One forum to turn to instead is the Unz Review, which recently posted this splendid and important new essay by Steve Sniegoski: "American Entry into World War One: The Weekly Standard's Fractured History and the Reality." [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2017)

Other recommended reading:
The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, by Thomas Fleming (2008).
The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, by Walter Karp (1979).
"World War I on the Home Front," by Ralph Raico (2010, 2012).


Expedience. It is important to remember that a payment to an accuser to settle a lawsuit is not evidence that the accused is guilty. It is evidence only that settling is more economical (at least in the short run) than defending an accusation. It is not an admission of guilt, but an admission of expedience. Indeed, expedience is one of the forms by which pragmatism expresses itself in this country. I would offer the frequency of resorting to expedient solutions as evidence of how degraded this country has become. But then, not being in the public eye, I have no personal experience with the need to settle with accusers, and I do not have to face mobs demanding that I not be permitted to earn a living. [Ronn Neff] (April 2017)


"Pétain, c'est la France; la France, c'est Pétain"? You may have seen that the French Front National politician Marine Le Pen got into Holocaust trouble the other day. CNN writers James Masters and Margaux Deygas reported on April 10:

Le Pen suggested France was not responsible for the wartime round-up of Jews who were sent to Nazi death camps. With just 13 days until the first round of voting in France's presidential election, her remarks have been met with widespread condemnation.

Her stance is at odds with former president Jacques Chirac and current premier Francois Hollande, who have both apologized for the role played by French police in the rounding up of 13,000 Jews at the Vel d'Hiv cycling track in Paris, ordered by the Nazis in July 1942.

Le Pen was trying to undermine the idea of collectivist guilt. If "France" was guilty, and if "France" still exists, then it is still guilty, and those intent on destroying France will enjoy the advantage that "the sanction of the victim" gives them. If individuals were guilty and if they are not the people who are alive today, then the people who are alive today are not guilty, and those intent on destroying France would enjoy no such advantage.

Since, however, most people are collectivists, most people are unable to grasp her point. Moreover, since Marine Le Pen's own views embed a degree of collectivism, she herself is not able to articulate or defend the non-collectivist elements in them satisfactorily. (Not, of course, that even that ability would protect her from being "misunderstood," when people are determined to misunderstand.) It is nevertheless amazing to me that apparently most modern French politicians would rather think that Vichy was the real France, rather than the France of de Gaulle and the veterans who are honored on Liberation Day. [Ronn Neff] (April 2017)


I can't say what happens to others, but when I hear that dead babies are being used (again) as an excuse to bomb someone, alarms go off in my head. [Ronn Neff]
 

What is seen and what is not seen. How many innocents were killed in the attack on Shayrat Airfield? We "know" that none were targeted, but that does not answer the question. [RNN]
 

Once again, the United States has attacked a foreign country that had not attacked it, had not threatened to attack it, and could not attack it. Some "Defense" Department. I feel safer already. [RNN] (April 2017)


Woodrow Trump. Donald Trump's attack on Syria occurred on the hundredth anniversary of the United States's entering the Great War in Europe, at the behest of Woodrow Wilson. Appropriate, since the attack is a perfect example of Wilsonianism.

Of course, Congress's act on April 6, 1917, was at least legal under the Constitution. You remember the Constitution, right? The old rag that some state-believers used to work themselves into a lather about, in the waning days of the decrepit republic? How charmingly oldfangled!

I hear that President Assad has five more airfields. What about them? Will Trump blitz them, too, if bad things continue to occur in that faraway land? Will he (or "NATO" or some dummied-up Alliance for World Perfection) impose a no-fly zone? What about the Russian naval forces that appear to be headed for the same waters as the U.S. warships? Not to use an outré word, but what strategy do the American imperial utopians have in mind? Have they ever heard of unintended adverse consequences? Well, we already know that history — and I mean the history of their own time — rolls off them like water off a duck's back.

I've just used a cliché, though to good effect, I hope. Here's another fine old expression long since turned into a tired cliché thanks to the actions of our interventionist rulers: "[Go] not abroad in search ..." Oh, forget it, what's the use? [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2017)


Will the anti-war movement (overwhelmingly leftist as it is) now re-emerge from its long hibernation under the kindly drone-master and nation-breaker Obama? After all, there's a "Literally Hitler" Republican in the presidential palace now! Maybe it will, in the wake of the assault on Syria, but I wonder whether it might be unmanned by the supposed humanitarian motives of the attack — it's for the children ... the children! That's usually a powerful enough narcotic for American utopians of all parties. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2017)


One way to change a culture is just to make incessant demands loudly and importunately. Like parents with unruly children, the rest of society will usually respond by acceding to the demands if for no other reason than just to get those making the demands to shut up.

I propose a different tack: Let's encourage those who are making demands to change the culture and society to hold their breath until they get their way. [Ronn Neff] (April 2017)


Italy is on the verge of requiring employers to give their female employees paid leave for those days that the ladies are incommoded by their eerie, but somewhat regular, appointment with the moon.

I predict that once this becomes firmly entrenched in American society (by government regulation, of course), it will be only a matter of time — a short time at that — before workers refer to absent co-workers as having taken "a rag day."

I further predict that it will be only a matter of time — a short time at that — before said workers will be fired for having said it. [Ronn Neff] (March 2017)


A blessing on both their houses. "Sanctuary" jurisdictions all across the country are nullifying Central Government laws and decrees involving illegal immigrants, and in response Attorney General Jeff Sessions is threatening to withhold law-enforcement grants, i.e., pork-barrel subsidies from Mordor on the Potomac.

Now that's entertainment! So often, I'm left muttering, "A plague on both their houses" when political factions representing somewhat different shades of stygian evil shriek and claw at each other. But this time, I can only extend my encouragement to both sides in their tug-of-war, which is producing some creaks and strains in the — gasp! — Great American System of Rule.

Usually the Great Contradiction in that Great System works differently. I'm referring to the contradiction — crisscrossing contradictions, really — between procedure (federalism vs. centralization) and content (Liberty vs. Power). Normally, local jurisdictions are discovered to be practicing various forms of oppressive devilry, or are successfully portrayed as doing so, and the Central Government thunders to the rescue on its Pale Horse of Death — Huzzah! Draw your sabers, ye sons of Freedom! We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong! — expanding its size, expense, reach, and overall power along the way, to the delirious praise of all courtier propagandists.

The current fracas between the different levels of rule is a refreshing exception. No, I don't expect a useful civil war or uprising or secession. We should resist any such optimistic hopes. For one thing, we must expect the Left-nullificationists to squeal like banshees and attack like demons — but more or less legally — in order to preserve their loot, stolen from tax-victims all across the country; and the savvy gambler would probably put his money on them. The Left is hard to beat when it comes to courtroom combat and bureaucratic maneuvering. But right now, both the commissars of nullification and the thugs of Miniluv are inadvertently fighting for Liberty — something they both revile! Any hairline cracks in the megalith that their struggle creates are all to the good. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2017)


Tone-deaf Left. Apparently this is not a joke: Mrs. Hillary Clinton now enjoys the honor of a whiskey's having been named after her. It's called Rodham Rye.

"It's a tribute to women in history, and a tribute to women in our everyday lives," says Republic Restoratives co-founder Pia Carusone.

I can't imagine that I am the first to observe that this is a terrible name for a whiskey, but the Left just brings it on themselves: apparently they cannot hear what they are saying. (After all, these are the people who drink a beverage made of "bioengineered algae" called Soylent.)

But you'd think that somewhere in every ad agency there would be a Don Draper who could point out that you can't give a name to a whiskey celebrating women in history that sounds like "Rot 'em Rye."

You just can't. [Ronn Neff] (March 2017)


Ronn Neff's column of May 23 about the Rockville school rape (I recommend that you stop and read it first) has sparked some thought — as his writings tend to do — and reminded me of one particular evil inherent in government schooling.

The state forces taxpayers to pay for it, whether or not they have children who attend such institutions, and the state's compulsory-education decrees goad most parents into sending their children to them. As Mr. Neff says, parents should exert all efforts to keep their children out of those places. But even when it is possible to evade or minimize the damage of tyrannical state decrees, those decrees are still evil, they produce evil consequences, and those consequences deserve denunciation.

The evil consequence I'm thinking of today — inherent in robbing taxpayers to pay for a coercion-ridden school system — is denial of the freedom of association. The poor adolescent girl whom Mr. Neff writes of didn't exactly make a free choice to wind up in the same building with criminal savages, and her parents didn't exactly make a free choice resulting in her proximity to them.

If school and state were separated, even parents now dizzy with statish thinking would be less likely to be dizzy when choosing a school for their kids, just as they're less dizzy now when choosing where to shop for groceries, where to see a movie, or where to buy a used car. They'd have a lot more choices, for one thing, and affordable ones; and schools that featured violent savages among their student body would — let's just say — face some steep marketing challenges in reaching normal people.

I like alluding to used-car lots. I've done so quite a few times, pointing out the radically different quality of thinking that people engage in when shopping for a used car as opposed to the kind that they engage in when voting for politicians. The same dichotomy would reveal itself vividly if freedom reigned in the education industry — and, of course, if leviathan and its little friends were somehow prevailed upon to keep their filthy mitts off the culture in general. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2017)


Lind the Impeacher. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in his "questioning" of Judge Neil Gorsuch in the latter's confirmation hearings to become a justice of the Supreme Court, warned Donald Trump that if the president used waterboarding, he would be subject to impeachment.

Setting aside all questions about waterboarding (and what it has to do with Judge Gorsuch), it should not take a free-market anarchist to explain to the senator that neither he nor any other senator can initiate impeachment proceedings against the U.S. president. The House brings the charges and votes on impeachment. The Senate then tries the case.

Simple enough. But apparently being a senator has just gone to Mr. Graham's head. As a House member in 1998, not only was he on the Judiciary Committee that formulated the charges brought against Bill Clinton (the only elected president ever to be impeached), but he was one of the managers (i.e., prosecutors) of the case before the Senate.

He apparently has also lost sight of the fact that in the impeachment trial, it is the Chief Justice of the United States, not senators from South Carolina, who sit in judgment of the case. [Ronn Neff] (March 2017)


A new essay by Steve Sniegoski recently appeared at The Unz Review: "The Russian Peace Scare Averted, but What about Iran?"

Dr. Sniegoski says: "In my new essay, I point out how the generals Mattis and McMaster, who have been highly lauded in the mainstream media, are very hawkish on Iran and will reinforce Trump's belligerent position.... I argue against the crazy idea, held especially by Mattis but also by McMaster, that Iran is the cause of instability in the Middle East, and I point out that Iran's intervention outside its borders is fundamentally defensive."

Highly recommended! (By the way, I love Steve's bitterly satirical phrase, "the Russian peace scare.") [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2017)


The Women Who Don't Count. In many locales in the United States, women who have not made an issue of International Women's Day decided to declare a "Day without Women." This was supposed to protest Bill Clinton's actual molesting and raping of real women. Oh, wait, no, it wasn't. It was supposed to protest Donald Trump's talking about molesting women.

In any case, it was a fraud. It was not supposed to be a Day without Women, but rather a Day without Some Women. The women who work at McDonald's showed up for work. The women who work at boutiques and movie theaters showed up for work. The women who take the orders of the "Some Women" at Panera and Starbuck's worked. So did the "Some Women's" nannies — no day off for protests for them. Nurses and doctors showed up. Even meter maids and librarians. Prostitutes, too. And a lot of women showed up for two jobs.

Of course, Wednesday's demonstration continued in a vein we're already familiar with. The women who worked on Wednesday were Women Who Don't Count. The women who, if anyone needs the protection of the laws, they do. The women who were never meant to be protected. [Ronn Neff]

For further reading. The Women Who Don't Count were celebrated by Joe Sobran in his cover article for the March 1997 issue of SOBRAN'S. It has been reprinted here. (March 2017)


"For our freedom," again. At the Lew Rockwell site, Laurence M. Vance writes of Trump's telling Congress that commando Ryan Owens died "for our freedom":

"Saying What Needs To Be Said about the Military"
The lying is bad enough. But when the operators of the blood-drenched leviathan attempt to manipulate us through sentimentality — of all things! — how can people not just choke on it?

The cutting edge of the sword becomes visible when calls arise for withdrawal and non-intervention. Peace, in other words. Then we're told that it just cannot be done, and that still others must die, lest those who have died "for our freedom" be seen "to have died in vain." [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2017)


The Tarmac Exculpation. Jeff Sessions has been accused of meeting with the Russian ambassador and lying to the Senate about it in his confirmation hearings. Calls for his resignation or impeachment were soon to come.

Surely his defense should be obvious: "We were just talking about our travels and grandchildren." [Ronn Neff] (March 2017)


Sure, Ced, we all knew that's what you meant. You will recall the jawdropper that Rep. Cedric Richmond, a black Democrat from Louisiana, delivered to an audience on Wednesday about that photo of Kellyanne Conway on a couch in the Oval Office, perched on her knees: "[S]he really looked kind of familiar in that position there. But, don't answer, and I don't want you to refer back to the 1990s...."

The '90s ... the '90s ... Now who was president during almost all of the '90s? Oh! Omigod!

However, Richmond now says that the Monica-and-Bill, uh, connection isn't what he was referring to at all. According to The Daily Caller, he explains: "Where I grew up, saying that someone is looking or acting 'familiar' simply means that they are behaving too comfortably."

For her part, Conway calls Richmond's original remark "sexist." It's a shame she can't find language less left-wing, more traditional, and more powerful. But she also thinks there'd be "more media outrage about the comment if she were a liberal woman" (TheDC's words).

Well, duh. And to take it a step further, let's imagine that a conservative white congressman had said any such thing about a liberal black woman in some prominent post (or in any post). Would any promoter of respectable opinion settle for a risible explanation such as Richmond's? (Rhetorical question.) Or would they all be shrieking for him to resign? And for everyone around him to denounce and shun him? (More rhetorical questions.) [Nicholas Strakon]


Meanwhile, here's the kind of trivia that non-Democrats have to apologize for. We learn from the Clinton News Network that Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.) "said Thursday he regretted invoking a racially insensitive term and reference to explain why he would not hold in-person town hall events."

Bost had been adverting to the recent mobbing of such events by left-wing screechers and shouters. From the CNN story:

"The amount of time that I have at home is minimal, I need to make sure that it's productive," Bost told [The Southern] Illinoisan [newspaper]. "You know the cleansing that the Orientals used to do where you'd put one person out in front and 900 people yell at them? That's not what we need. We need to have meetings with people that are productive."
Gasp! And he did duly apologize, though he stopped a little distance short of self-abasement.

Bost had actually meant to refer to the "struggle sessions" conducted by the Chinese Maoists in the good old days of unlimited progressivism over there. His offending word, of course, was "Orientals." If he'd said "Asians," I suppose he'd have been OK. In other words, Bost's mistake was to use a word and concept invented by white Europeans long ago and not meant to demean — the Orient — instead of the other word and concept invented by white Europeans long ago and not meant to demean — Asia.

It's not as if some antediluvian White Devil had used the Western-imperialist word "Bombay" (second gasp!) instead of the commendably native rendering "Mumbai." Or "Ceylon" instead of "Sri Lanka."

"Racially insensitive." We're not at war with Eastasia, comrades; we're at war with the commissars who control our culture, including our language. [NS]

Modine Herbey comments: It's almost enough to get me saying "Peking" again. And I'm not referring to duck. (March 2017)


"We didn't mean nothin'." The Republican Congress sent six bills to Barack Obama repealing the so-called Affordable Care Act. Of course, as they knew he would, he vetoed them.

Now there is a president who campaigned on a promise to repeal the ACA. Congress doesn't need to write a new bill. They have six just sitting around. And yet they do not send even one of them to him.

Why do you suppose that is? Can it be that it was all just political theater? Is Congress saying, "We was just funnin'"? [Ronn Neff] (March 2017)


Our conflict-free future. In objections to Donald Trump's nominees for political appointments, indeed in objections to the Trump presidency itself, we keep hearing the expression of "concerns" (no one dares to use the word "accusation") about conflicts of interest.

As the state reaches ever more deeply into everyone's economic and personal life, it becomes problematic whether anyone will ever be able to enter politics who does not have a potential "conflict of interest." This will leave political office closed to people from business or the work force, and open only to people who have spent their entire lives in, ahem, "public service." Well, them and lawyers.

Lawyers and people in public service almost never have "conflicts of interest." They are those fortunate among us who enjoy, rather, what we may call happy intersections of interests. [Ronn Neff] (February 2017)


A dumb mistake! Campus Reform is reporting that students are being arrested on college campuses for handing out copies of the Constitution without permission. During the Nixon administration, it was popular for young leftists to sport a poster in their college dorm rooms showing the Bill of Rights with "Void Where Prohibited by Law" stamped on it.

At the time, I thought I was to understand that the Left was warning us against the excesses of the Nixon administration. How silly of me. What it was, of course, was a statement of end goals. [Ronn Neff] (February 2017)


Offsite alert — new Steve Sniegoski article. Just posted at the Unz Review is a new essay by Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski: "As a Critic of NATO, Trump Is in Good Company." I recommend it highly.

An excerpt:

The media has generally presented Trump as being ignorant and nonsensical in his discussion of American policies, and one example is his negative references to NATO as obsolete. The mainstream media is aghast that any political leader of the U.S. could possibly take a negative view of such an allegedly iconic alliance as NATO....

... But if we take a brief walk down memory lane, we will discover that Trump is actually in very good company in his criticism of NATO, and those NATO critics include luminaries of the foreign policy establishment whom the Washington Post and the New York Times once readily embraced.

Here, if you will, are some "alternative facts" that the memory-hole media either have conveniently forgotten or are working to obscure. It turns out that the study of history reveals many such facts — as veteran readers of Dr. Sniegoski's writing are well aware. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2017)


Wages of empire. (I may have used that title before.)

On January 28, Politico Playbook ran something about incoming Iraqis' being detained at Kennedy Airport in response to President Trump's immigration order, and added the comment: "We will see a lot of these stories in coming weeks. People who have fought alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan want to come here, and will not be allowed to."

(But chances are they will.)

You may have heard paleoconservatives sum up the neocon and war-liberal strategy as, "Invade the world; invite the world." As some European countries that used to be imperial powers have found out to their distress — and as we Americans have discovered, too, over the past few decades — invading the world can amount to the same thing as inviting the world. Or attracting it, at least. Ordinary natives may hate the empire in the lands under its hegemony, but some will have taken the emperor's coin, and in any event the imperial metropole will exert a magnetic force on many people. Especially if it seems to offer the best chance for crawling out from under the rubble produced by imperialism.

How many more America-bound refugees from strange parts will Trump inadvertently recruit if he actually launches his promised crusade against ISIS? U.S. taxpayers might want to gin up some curiosity about that, if they are still capable of any such thing. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2017)


Superb Owl Sunday. (We got that right, didn't we?)

I literally did not know when the Superb Owl was to be broadcast until this past week when I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about someone named Brady. I don't know who he is, but I guess he's a friend of Trump's, and therefore a bad guy ('cause Trump isn't allowed to have friends — it's right there in the Constitution).

Then yesterday I heard someone on the radio named Theismann who used to play sports of some sort somewhere around here but now owns a restaurant, and I learned the names of the teams that will be involved somehow in the Owl.

I have concluded that Americans' obsession with team games has something to do with collectivism. No one ever gets this excited about fencing matches or chess matches anymore, unless there's a "team" competing somewhere and we can all chant "U_S_A. U_S_A."

The only social value I can figure out for team games is the opportunity they present for gamblers to make an honest living. But then, so do presidential and papal elections. [Ronn Neff] (February 2017)


I'm trans-unsurprised. It transpired last week that the Boy Scouts are now going to admit "transgender boys" (i.e., mentally disturbed girls) into their organization. (What could go wrong?) According to the Washington Post, the group started allowing confessed homosexuals to be Scouts in 2013, and started allowing confessed homosexuals to be Scout leaders in 2015.

There's much here that's unsurprising, including the fact that totalitarian authorities determined to grind the freedom of association into dust have been threatening the Scouts to get them to move in a sexually deviant direction. But all the mandarins on the commanding heights of the culture, even those with no official political power, are pushing for the same thing. You may note that the Postwriters, in their story, refer to the newly eligible girls as boys. With no quote marks. No government authority forced them to do that.

So: 2013 ... 2015 ... 2017 ... What fine new frontier of "progress" will 2019 bring for the Scouts?

Of one thing we may be sure. In the words of Ronn Neff, "The Left still follows the lead of Franklin Roosevelt: unconditional surrender." [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2017)


"Anarchists." At one point, thirty or forty years ago, I hoped that we real anarchists — that is, market anarchists — might make some progress in ditching the old image of the anarchist as a hairy psycho in a long black coat, holding a bomb that looked like a bowling ball with a fizzing fuse. Then, sometime in the '90s, I stumbled across an anarchist magazine at a newsstand and for the first time saw that symbol with the scrawled capital "A" in a circle. Well! That was interesting. But leafing through the mag, I started smelling something bad. It turned out that those young self-described anarchists not only opposed what they took to be capitalism (de rigueur for the old-time economically confused anarchists) but also opposed technology and, uh, civilization itself. Hear me: they explicitly opposed technology and civilization. However, they very much favored rock music. At least a third of the magazine was devoted to rock music and concert reviews. (I've forgotten the periodical's name, but I think it was not Anarchy magazine, which I recall as being somewhat better, though not market-oriented.)

I never knew how influential or well-distributed the "circled A" magazine was — though its symbol soon took off — but in any case its contents were not auspicious. Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and the other vintage anarchists were wrong about many things, but they also wrote much of intellectual depth and interest. I found none of that in this publication. (And I examined several issues of it.)

It seemed that devolution was in progress.

A few years later, I started to see masked vandals calling themselves anarchists show up at confabs of global ruling-class eminentoes and run through the streets breaking windows — windows belonging not to the eminentoes but to peaceful shopkeepers. In 2009, after the vandals ran amok in Pittsburgh during one such conclave of the fascist elite, I had a little bitter fun with it all, writing, "Once again, anti-capitalists held a big meeting — and, once again, other anti-capitalists showed up to protest it! Strange days ... strange days, indeed."

The days were about to get stranger, from the true-anarchist perspective. And more exasperating. As you may have noticed, the street-thug variety of "anarchist" is becoming more violent. Such "anarchists" may sometimes scuffle with the cops, but that's only on an incidental basis as they attack their main target, which is private people and their property. Notably absent from their "anarchist" target list is the state itself. Well, that last part is understandable: outside of government-university campuses, run by the limpest of noodles, the state is too well-armed and dangerous.

These "anarchists" should watch out, though, lest they encounter some private people who are also well-armed and dangerous. That consideration may be why they tend to initiate their violence in one-party jurisdictions under the commie heel, such as California, where the commissars in power suppress the right of self-defense.

Another reason, no doubt, is that such commie jurisdictions are much more likely to give rise to such tyranny-minded "anarchists" in the first place.

These commie hoodlums who think they're anarchists don't just assault people and destroy their property. Another of their remarkable policies was evident at Berkeley on February 1: they violently oppose the freedom of association.

As well as freedom of expression, naturally.

Some "anarchists." They're as counterfeit as the Spanish "anarchists" George Orwell wrote about in Homage to Catalonia who ran customs posts on the border and accepted positions as government ministers in the "Republican" faction.

And they are no threat to leviathan. Quite the contrary. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2017)


Lower than false. The other day I asked a young fellow what he thought of the proposed 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods. "Sounds like discrimination to me," he said. I snorted. I couldn't help myself.

The schools are so soaked in leftist memes and gobbledy-gook that apparently we can no longer depend on our adversaries even to offer trite, mercantilist fallacies. [Ronn Neff] (January 2017)


Off-site alert. Steve Sniegoski has a hard-hitting, protein-rich piece of analysis up at the Unz Review, and I heartily recommend it to your attention: "Liberals Morph from Peaceniks to Warhawks on Government Intelligence Agencies." Steve comments:

This is my analysis of the January 6 intelligence report — "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections" — which the mainstream media have presented as clearly showing that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to aid Trump. I point out that while mainstream liberals in the latter years of the Cold War were skeptical, and largely critical, of U.S. policy, they now have become warhawks and automatically accept the claims of the "Intelligence Community."

I also deal with some aspects of the intelligence report that have received little attention: e.g., no mention of "fake news" and lack of statistical analysis to demonstrate alleged Russian media bias. Most significantly, the report does not even claim to focus on the 2016 election but is concerned about an alleged broader Russian goal to combat the United States' "liberal democratic order," of which support for Trump was only one part. As a result, the report is filled with information that does not pertain to Russian support for Trump.

Sober scholar that he is, I'm afraid that Steve can't help making an awful lot of people look silly here. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2017)


Mad. Thomas Merton, in Raids on the Unspeakable, writes that "the wicked little characters in the Lord of the Flies come face to face with the lord of the flies, form a small, tight, ferocious collectivity of painted faces, and arm themselves with spears to hunt down the last member of their group who still remembers with nostalgia the possibilities of rational discourse."

It is an image we should draw on often: the Left has become "a small, tight, ferocious collectivity of painted faces, [who] arm themselves with spears to hunt down the last member of their group who still remembers with nostalgia the possibilities of rational discourse."

Trump's electoral win has pushed the Left far beyond "Red Guard" status. They exhibit Chesterton's definition of madness: "They are speaking nonsense and they cannot stop." Their madness comes "by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas." And of course, the one thing madness cannot endure is rational discourse. [Ronn Neff]


And joyless. Many have noted the Left's inability to laugh, except when their jokes are vulgar and filthy. Which brings me to Chesterton again: "In anything that does cover the whole of your life — in your philosophy and your religion — you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness."

That in turn reminds me of Kellyanne Conway's observation that Hillary Clinton was "one of the most joyless presidential candidates in history."

If Chesterton and Conway are right, then Hillary Clinton and her most ardent supporters are close to being outright mad (if they are not yet). Perhaps that is the main problem with socialism: it makes joy ever more difficult. Perhaps the Russian people were sustained by their own gallows humor ("we pretend to work; they pretend to pay us"). What else, humanly speaking, can possibly enable the human spirit to hold up under Stalinism? [RNN] (January 2017)


But sir, we're just trying to serf you better! In the next month or so, Wells-Fargo will start requiring its drive-through account-holders who make cash deposits to supply a photo ID with their deposit slip.

How, pray, does this protect me? or make my money safer?

How does it even protect Wells-Fargo from fraud? Do they check the cash for counterfeits later and plan to get back to the depositor?

It's pretty obvious that this new policy responds to some demand made by the government. (Treasury? Homeland Security? IRS? Who can say?)

Only the government is worried about who is depositing cash. Only the government needs or wants a record of who put cash into my account. And once again, your neighbors employed in banks put their heads down, say "Yes sir," and work as an arm of law enforcement.

But wait! I get it. When my enemies decide to frame me for embezzlement or selling nuclear and copy-editing secrets to Tajikistan, the investigators will see the princely cash deposits to my account and say, "Aha!"

I guess I'm being ungrateful to the bank that is just trying to protect me. But I think I'd prefer to take my chances. Besides, I've arranged to put that money in my Dubai account. [Ronn Neff] (January 2017)


Clever. Voting is silly (at best), because your vote will never change anything, except maybe your own moral status (for the worse). But I have to hand it to a "Friend" on Facebook for the following observation, sharp as a needle. If there could be some point to voting, this might be it:

... [T]he main reason to vote Republican if you simply have to vote for candidates from one of the two major parties is that, if a Democrat wins the election, criticism in the mainstream media largely vanishes. This is not so bad when talking about, say, the diameter [of] drain pipes in your neighborhood. But it's disastrous in areas like foreign policy. The United States has a proud tradition of bombing the crap out of Third World countries, killing children at wedding parties, and just generally spreading death and destruction throughout the world. When the Democrats are in office, the anti-war movement shuts down. This is bad. So do your part by voting Republican. Keep the dialogue going.
Tip o' the hat to K.A.H. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2017)
Further reading: "Double Standards: Where Were the Liberal Protestors During Obama's Wars?," by Mike Whitney, CounterPunch, January 26, 2017.

Nassssty womyn, female and otherwise. The progressive movement is making more progress disappearing up its own backside.

First, Black Womyn Of Color were offended because there were too many white women involved in last Saturday's Womyn's March. In fact, they seemed offended that any white women were involved at all:

ShiShi Rose, a blogger from Brooklyn, spoke for many, writing, "Now is the time for you (white women) to be listening more, talking less ... You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry."
Well, okay. There was also the horrifying fact that the majority of white women had voted not for the sainted Hillary, but for the evil Trump monster, which meant that the white women who did vote for Hillary were also guilty ... or something. Anyway, that was easily fixed by installing token Black Womyn Of Color in important leadership positions and by a campaign of self-criticism among the whites that would have done proud a "struggle session" in China during the Cultural Revolution. Sure, the Black Womyn Of Color are still pissed off, but the whites are cowering appropriately, so all's well.

Except.

It seems that, besides being too white, the March was too ... well, oriented toward female genitalia. In a more civilized era, a vast clowder of women carrying signs referring to vaginas, and walking around in costumes resembling vulvas, would have offended normal people and marginalized the movement that fostered it. And, in fact, a 25-year-old woman working in my office who went to the March here in Trantor left quickly because she was disgusted by the vulgarity. But in these depraved times, the offended persons who count are in fact men who pretend to be women, because they were not endowed by Nature with vaginas, and therefore feel left out:

"The main reason I decided not to go was because of the pussy hats," 28-year-old Jade Lejeck said in an interview Sunday night. "I get that they're a response to the 'grab them by the pussy' thing, but I think some people fixated on it the wrong way."

Lejeck, a trans woman from Modesto, California, said the hats signaled to her that there would be other trans-exclusionary messages at the women's marches.

She expected her local march to have its fair share of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, known as TERFs. As Lejeck described it, there are two categories of TERFS: One is the accidental TERF — "the ones who have signs that equate womanhood with having a vagina," she said. The other category, Lejeck explained, includes feminists who argue trans women are actually men in disguise trying to infiltrate their spaces.

This looks like the kind of conflict that can't be smoothed over, as both sides fight desperately over who gets to claim the coveted mantle of greatest victim. One would think the trannies had it in the bag, but some feminists seem to have allowed their overwhelming hatred of men to cloud their revolutionary consciousness, and embraced the reactionary idea that one's sex is determined by ... one's sex.

The question, of course, is this: as the progressive movement grows crazier, will such conflicts become more common? For instance, will the inevitable initiative to normalize child molestation run into conflict with those who put the "rights" of children above all, including parents? Will the bestiality advocates run into the same problem with the animal-rights wackos? Or will the conflicts be papered over, just as feminists ignore the problems of Islamic rape culture and the brutal way low-class blacks treat women? And will white feminists — who after all have embraced the whole black-victimization theme mainly as a way to hurt the lower-middle- and working-class whites whom they hate above all — grow weary of being treated like the help by vicious blacks gleefully brandishing their superior victimhood?

Whatever happens, at least we marginalized, superannuated reactionaries can console ourselves with the hilarious vision of crabbed, hideous feminists and shrieking drama-queen trannies clawing each other's eyes out. It's something, I guess. [David T. Wright] (January 2017)


Man-up to Manning. I have to say I'm glad that Chelsea (né Bradley) Manning's sentence has been commuted. I was glad that Daniel Ellsberg never went to prison. And I hope Edward Snowden stays ... well, as free as a person can be in Russia.

But, then, I'm a free-market anarchist.

I know there are lots of night-watchman limited government libertarians out there who have also been agitating, "Free Chelsea Manning." And I can't for the life of me figure out what argument they would use to urge others to free him. He was charged with espionage, and pleaded guilty.

Let me put it this way to the Randians, Hornbergerians, and other exponents of a free market and limited government:

Should espionage be a crime or not? [Ronn Neff] (January 2017)


The Times proclaims a crisis. Did you see this? —

"How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump," by Scott Shane, Nicholas Confessore, and Matthew Rosenberg, New York Times, January 11, 2017.
The Timesmen write, "The consequences of the dossier, put together by a former British spy named Christopher Steele, are incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day."

From here in the Outer Hayseed Darkness, it seems pretty obvious that this "dossier" is a crisis for the lefties, pushing Obama's farewell speech out of the news, helping Trump give CNN its comeuppance, and generally blowing up in their face — yet it's a "crisis" for Trump. [Edward Morrison Morley] (January 2017)


Oh, there were "traps," eh? Something in today's edition of Politico Playbook caught my eye. The discussion concerns Obamacare, and the particular segment is headed, "But some fear Trump seems to be falling into some traps Obama fell into."

Democrats say privately that their desire to pass Obamacare and damn the political consequences was one of their worst mistakes in the last decade. They worked tirelessly — nights and weekends — to get the Affordable Care Act to Obama's desk, only to be stuck with a flawed and deeply unpopular law that has cost them dearly at the polls. Republicans worry Trump's desire to replace the law on the same day they repeal it will be equally shortsighted. Health care is complicated....
Just two things, if I may.

1) "One of the worst mistakes"? "Flawed"? Didn't the Democrats crow publicly, for years, that Obamacare was the greatest thing since Social Security, the TVA, and, I dunno, World War II? (Except, that is, for those Democrats who tsk'd and said that, instead, "we" need to go to a "single-payer" system — i.e., old-time socialism.) Ah, once again I reveal myself to be a childlike naïf, in venturing to point out the deceit or idiocy of politicians. If I were a reasonable adult, I'd keep quiet about all that, and march out and vote at every opportunity.

2) "Health care is complicated." Uh-hunh. Maybe too complicated to entrust to ignorant, brutalitarian government and its privileged clients? Hello! Calling Mises ... or Hayek ... or anyone with a sound conception of human society ... [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2017)


Our senior editor, Ronn Neff, has been accomplishing unheralded but praiseworthy work at his own site, Thornwalker, collecting writings by the late Joe Sobran that were on the verge of being lost to readers thanks to the vagaries of the Net. Mr. Neff recently published what he hopes is the definitive edition of Mr. Sobran's 32,000-word essay from 1985, "Pensées."

It is presently the first menu item on the page. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2017)


Off-site alert. Steve Sniegoski has an important new piece at The Unz Review: "Russian Interference in the Election: A Media Hoax?" As you'd expect of an article by Steve, it is illuminating, well-argued, and solidly backed up.

Steve himself describes it as follows: "My article ... goes over the mainstream media's Russian election interference narrative, which it has hyped to the nth degree. I try to bring some clarity to the nebulous meaning of Russian interference, which includes a number of alleged Russian misdeeds — 'fake news,' computer hacking, and manipulating voting machines. Although separate, these have been jumbled together to show that Russia interfered with the election to the extent that it might have made Trump president." [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2017)


Smudge-out. The latest Negro antiwhite atrocity to come to light burst straight through the established media's filters, probably thanks to a firestorm on social media. Some (including me) suspect that, otherwise, Minitrue's national outlets would have blacked it out entirely, as usual. I refer to this horror, as reported — yes! — by the Washington Post on January 5: "Hate crime charges filed after 'reprehensible' video shows attack on mentally ill man in Chicago," by Mark Berman and Derek Hawkins.

Berman and Hawkins lead off: "Authorities in Chicago charged four young African American adults with hate crimes Thursday after a video broadcast live on Facebook appeared to show them shouting obscenities about President-elect Donald Trump and white people while abusing a man authorities say has mental health problems." (My emphases.) That reads like an actual news story, from before the clamp-down!

The trouble here is that the huddled flown-over masses (those unexposed to social-media samizdat) get much more of their news from TV than from fancy papers such as the Post, and sure enough it was on TV that a smudge-out occurred. At least it did on the WANE-TV News, at noon the next day, January 6. WANE is the CBS affiliate in Fort Wayne, so this was a story straight from CBS central. After saying that the victim was "bound and gagged in an apartment as the suspects shouted racial slurs," the newsreader went on to report: "Investigators believe the four targeted the victim not because of his race but because of his disability." I heard that with my own ears.

I don't know what "investigators" that CBS story refers to, but in fact, the Chicago cops aren't committing themselves. Here's what Berman and Hawkins wrote the day before: "When asked whether the hate crime charges stemmed from the 18-year-old's mental health or his race — both of which are factors listed in the state's hate crime statute — [detective commander] Duffin said: 'It's half a dozen of one, six of the other.'"

Kudos to Steve Sniegoski for developing the concept of a media smudge-out. It's what they resort to when they can't completely cover up undesirable news. The nicest thing I can say about CBS's smudge-out is that it was inept, allowing alert viewers to see right through it.

The background of all this, of course, is that our supervisors consider it infinitely more objectionable for someone to be assaulted because he has a disability than it is for him to be assaulted because he is privileged with whiteness. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2017)

Related reading: "Racial Gang Attacks — Why Won't the MSM
Tell Us the Numbers?"
, by John Derbyshire, VDare, January 7, 2017.


2016 archive.

Published in 2017 by WTM Enterprises.