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| Nicholas Strakon Publisher & Editor-in-chief |
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| April 7, 2021 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| The Tragic Difference between Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts
In 1954, the American Legion adopted a resolution accusing the Girl Scouts of America handbook of giving “United Nations and One World citizenship precedence over American citizenship” and recommending “writings of certain pro-Communist authors” as “authentic historical material.” (Howard Zinn comes immediately to mind.) The group urged “withdrawal of all support of the Girl Scout movement” until the organization eliminated such influences. Naturally, even during the supposedly oppressive McCarthy era, the media of the time reacted with more laughter than concern, and berated the Legion for alarmism and ignorance. Contrast this with the poor Boy Scouts, who have been excoriated for a generation for not accepting homosexuals as members and scoutmasters — at the same time the organization was being sued out of existence because secret queers within had been molesting scouts for decades! And getting nothing but scorn from the media on both counts! Has there ever been a more insane spectacle than the scouts’ agreeing to accept open homosexuals at the same time they were declaring bankruptcy due to past third-sex infiltration? It gets even worse. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled (Stogner v. California) that states cannot re-criminalize crimes for which the statute of limitations (SOL) has expired. The case involved a man (Marion Stogner) who molested his own children, who did not come forward until after the SOL had expired. After that expiration, California passed legislation eliminating the SOL for his offenses, then tried and convicted Stogner. But the court ruled (rightly) that this was an ex-post-facto law and therefore unconstitutional. Nevertheless, from what I see in the press, the Boy Scouts are apparently refusing to use this precedent as a defense against oblivion, and are openly inviting those claiming they were abused half a century ago or more to sue. Talk about a death wish! * * * If He Could See Things As They Are Now ... “The happiest day that might be foreseen for the American taxpayer is that on which his miserable representatives in Government begin to live in physical fear for their lives and persons and give some consideration to the constituency for whom their contempt is commensurate with their availability for looting. An American Congressman fleeing from a mob of taxpayers while his house burned would be the heartening sight of a lifetime. An election every four years isn’t as effectual as would be the assassination of a legislator every four minutes, because the enemy isn’t only in Moscow. He’s much nearer at home.” — Lucius Beebe * * * 150 Years of Alarmist Bull ... feathers “Earth Day, 1970: Twenty Years to Live!” by Ben-Peter Terpstra, at AmericanThinker.com, December 4, 2009. The author observed that Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.), one of the inspirations for Earth Day, “warned in speeches in 1970 that Americans in a few years might have to filter their water several times daily and don gas masks.” As we are all so unfortunately aware today, Nelson was right about mandatory masks — but wretchedly wrong about the gas! Also: “Some said it was too late, even in 1970, to solve problems of air and water pollution. Others, railing against the widespread use of cars, air conditioning and power mowers, predicted American lifestyles would have to become much simpler.” They’re still saying it, and they’re just as full of bull ... compost today as they were fifty years ago. * * * More Vintage Biden corruption “The Senator from MBNA,” by Byron York, The American Spectator, January 1998. During Joe Biden’s 1996 campaign for a fifth Senate term, his long-forgotten GOP opponent raised a desperate question about the sale of the incumbent’s home, claiming it had been purchased for twice its value as a legal way to buy political favors from the senator. Described by York as an “old mansion on three and a half acres of what used to be a du Pont family estate outside Wilmington,” the home was purchased in February 1996 by John Cochran, a top honcho of the MBNA America bank, one of the nation’s largest issuers of credit cards, which was headquartered in Delaware. MBNA was a powerful political influence in the state. Biden damned the report as a lie and provided documentation, including a real estate appraisal, that the house had been sold for its appraised value of $1.2 million — $2,011,579 in 2021 dollars. He called the charge “immoral and unethical”; and, of course, cowardly state Republicans eagerly turned on their own candidate and savaged him as a liar. The Biden campaign declared that the sale was “not an issue we’re going to deal with in this campaign.” If the GOP had known then what we all know now about the language used by a Biden campaign, that should have been a tip-off that there was more to the matter than Sleepy Joe wanted to talk about. For this article, Byron York did some research that no Republican or reporter did in 1996. He looked into the three other, similar houses in the area, which had been used as “comparables” for the Biden appraisal. One that was appraised at $1,013,000 sold for $800,000. Another valued at $1,163,000 sold for $1 million, and a third, appraised at $1,230,000 sold for $1,007,500. “In all three cases, the homes sold for a good deal less than their appraised value.” So, was the Biden sale a political payoff, or was Biden just lucky? Following the purchase, Biden’s campaign was literally deluged by contributions from MBNA executives, and his son, Hunter, was given a job. The company bigwigs apparently used the legal “bundling” procedure to enrich the campaign — a practice Biden had long decried and even attempted to outlaw. When York asked about those donations, Biden’s Senate office would say only that the senator “is proud of the support he has received from the business community in Delaware.” When York inquired of MBNA in 1998, the firm refused to reveal Hunter’s salary or his position, and Hunter declined to be any more forthcoming. Wikipedia (hardly an impeccable source) says Hunter held a title of “executive vice president” at MBNA in 1998, but does not list a departure date, noting only, “He then left to serve [under Bill Clinton’s administration] at the United States Department of Commerce until 2001.” Now we know what an interesting life Hunter has lived since then. * * * The Facts of Media Life “The tactics of smear almost always tell us that the smear’s target has offered facts and arguments that can’t be answered on their merits — the only way to answer them at all is to attack the person who brings them up in the first place.” — Dr. Samuel T. Francis, 2004 * * * A New Form of Legal Piracy Under Obama’s unabashedly anti-white attorney general, Eric Holder, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division extracted massive monetary tribute from corporations in discrimination lawsuits, and initiated a new practice of directing some of that money to radical, “activist” groups for leftist political purposes. After the individual “victims” were supposed to have been made whole — even in settlements where no fault was admitted and the defendant was never found guilty — Holder and division chief Thomas Perez (later the notorious DNC chairman) gave remaining funds to “qualified organizations” and only they decided what “qualified” meant! * * * At Least They Understood the Problem In 1978, a U.S. Department of Agriculture news release, seeking help from the public to put its regulations into “plain English,” was delayed — because the first version was “too complicated to read.” * * * What a Difference a Century Makes!
* * * Point of View “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” — H.L. Mencken * * * How Stupid Can You Get? The March 1978 issue of “The Carter Watch” newsletter offered the following set of quotes: “To the Soviets, détente is an opportunity to continue the process of world revolution without running the threat of a nuclear war.” (Jimmy Carter, presentation to the DNC, May 1976) But he was elected anyway! * * * Don’t Hold Your Breath Following Barack Obama’s defeat of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Nancy Pelosi said to Terry of Moran of ABCNews, “I think that women, we have to get away from the politics of victim. This is about you go out there and fight.” Pelosi and her junta accused Donald Trump of fomenting rebellion and sedition because he told his supporters to ’fight.” When does her impeachment trial begin? * * * A Definition Worth Remembering “Envy plus rhetoric equals ‘social justice.’” — Thomas Sowell |
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| Flashback archive | April 7, 2021 | |||||||||||||||||||
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TLD is a forum of opinion, edited by hard-core market anarchists, that does not flinch from any of the most pressing issues of our time. We are especially interested in questions of culture and ethnicity, our Polite Totalitarian ruling class, and the homicidal humanitarianism of the U.S. Empire.
Our writers include anarcho-pessimists, Old Believers in the West, unreconstructed Confederates, neo-Objectivists, and other enemies of the permanent regime. We are conscientiously indifferent to considerations of thoughtcrime. Thus, from individualist and Euro-American perspectives, we confront the end of civilization — and do our level best to name its destroyers. (More about who we are.) General e-mail to The Ditch: lastditch@thornwalker.com. "If this government cared about ideas, it would crack down on The Last Ditch. It could be called The Joy of Thinking." "Whoever said 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty' didn't realize it, but he was thinking of The Last Ditch." — Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance Permanently recommended readings
"What Is Austrian Economics?" (Mises Institute)
Published by Thornwalker at thornwalker.com |
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