Trinidad a Western government?

Trinidad?

Well, geographically, yes.

But the Occident is white.

That government?

Of an insignificant island peopled by Africans and East Indians (as the CIA Facebook has it)?

Well, Western-style, maybe.

But Western?

Pshaw.

About race

Sailer at Taki.

How wonderfully un-PC, right down to the bit about the extinction of large, tasty mammals due to the arrival from Asia of les peaux rouges.

Mon Dieu!

They must change that name!

Hockey in France.

An author who came in from the cold?

Open Veins.

I could never bring myself to read the book.

I feared from the title it would be even worse, much worse, than A People's History of the United States.

A new life

My wife, 3 months younger than I, has retired after 47 years of working.

Yesterday, Friday, the 30th of May, was her last day.

She is happy as a clam.

Sad but true. Wishing won't make it so.

Life's hard lessons.

Who will be America's De Gaulle?

"Je vous ai compris," he said.

"I have understood you," and then he left French Algeria in the lurch and got France definitively out of the colonialism business.

We need an American president who will say to the Japanese, the Lithuanians, the Israelis, and the Brits, "I have understood you," and close all our bases, and bring our forces home from, everywhere east of Provincetown and west of Honolulu.

And get America definitively out of the globo-cop business.

Alas, this will not change in my lifetime.

And probably not in yours.

Not ready to come in from the cold

Not without property rights and settlement of long overdue debts.

La Tentation Totalitaire

US man was Syria suicide bomber

What’s this, bait? Bloody idiots.

New federal database will track Americans' credit ratings, other financial information

One stop shopping for hackers selling to identity thieves.

Everybody gets hacked, people.

Wake the f up.

The professional left on the victory of the Euro-skeptics

Meet The Far-Right Groups Who’ll Decide Europe’s Future

By “far right” and “extreme right” they mean, variously, nationalist, racist, opposed to gay rights integral to the latter-day sexual revolution, and opposed to the loss of sovereignty, political and economic, to the EU.

Positions on economics, the class war, or the welfare state are not mentioned and not, for them, a litmus test for “right” and “left.”

And it is really not true that all Euro-skeptic, anti-immigration parties, spokespeople, or leaders frankly alarmed by Islam are particularly opposed to the sexual revolution.

Remember Pym Fortyn?

Anybody heard of Bruce Bawer?

Sometimes the writers at this site are just silly.

Sample.

Despite its blatant Islamophobia, The Freedom Party ended up doubling its seats in the European Parliament after this year’s elections after its third-place finish in Austria.

Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache was interviewed by The Telegraph where he defended his party’s stance by saying, “It is not about keeping Austria white, just about protecting its traditional community. We see Europe as a Christian, and we believe it’s at risk of Islamisation.”

Sorry, their seats doubled despite their Islamophobia?

[ Islamophobia = a perfectly reasonable fear of, distaste for, opposition to, or rejection of Islam. ]

Wow, that’s just splendidly reality-based.

And attributing to all of them what are in fact splinter views of a minority of them is just the standard smear we all expect from such respectable, main-stream political sites as this one.

The Roma, by the way, are a well-known tribe of thieves, the Gypsies, whose cause the left has adopted in recent decades.

Right up there with the causes of North Vietnam, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and others they have adopted.

To these writers at this site, this is extreme.

My bolding.

As is common among right-wing groups, the DPP boasts a “tough on crime” policy, speaks of the family as “the heart” of society, and insists on the importance of preserving and strengthening its national heritage.

The party takes this third position to its nationalist extreme, however, insisting that, in its own words, “Denmark is not an immigrant-country and never has been. Thus we will not accept transformation to a multiethnic society.”

Sure, the New World is full of multi-ethnic immigrant nations.

Only those who look forward to not just a global economy but a global government and a global culture (that part of the “multi” stuff is basically a hoax) think the whole world has to go that way.

By the way, if you think any non-white country on Earth would accept an immigration policy that would risk making it predominantly, or even significantly, white you are sadly in error.

And the same left that wants to turn whites into minorities, or anyway much weaker majorities, where they now dominate would certainly help non-white nations resist white colonization.

Oh, wait. 

They already did. 

Nothing like it in the world

US approves Venezuela sanctions bill

Says the story,

"The United States Congress must stand ready to act on the cause of freedom and democracy around the globe," Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said during the debate in the House.

Heartland Republican isolationism, eh?

More like the post-9/11 neoconservative revival of the Wilsonism they share with the establishment globo-liberal Democrats.

And with the foreign-born, interventionist foreign policy elite of both parties, many of them refugee immigrants and all of them equipped with a heavy axe to grind.

The constitution should have closed and should close the entire government and not just the presidency to the foreign-born.

Want a peaceable America?

Do that.

Does anybody believe Descartes on that one?

Animals are sentient meat, too.

Some seem quite intelligent.

How smart do you have to be to be "sapient"?

Christians say humans have free will, hence are moral subjects, and hence are Hell-worthy; but animals don't and so aren't.

Some people who reject any radical difference between man and other animals such as those posited by Christians, Cartesians, or some libertarians insist animals, like humans, have rights, though few spokesmen for that view say they have duties.

Most uneducated people say dogs, at least, feel guilty and know when they have done wrong - which would seem to belie the idea that they cannot have duties.

And if they feel guilt when they cross humans what about when they cross others in the social order of the pack?

All the same, the taboo theory of morals would seem to make it impossible to ascribe moral beliefs to animals.

On that view, morality is essentially befuddlement, confusion, and error about the meaningfulness of certain words in certain uses, and for that one must be capable of language, oneself.

But it is an easy mistake to make.

On the same view, morality, after all, is just a feature of the coercion, intimidation, and violence that characterize not only human but animal societies and the society that includes domestic animals and men, resting on not too dissimilar instincts, sentiments, and even feelings such as guilt.

But Aristotle was right to insist "justice" is a feature of social life only for animals that can talk.

Cryptic quarrels in novels

Lennart Kollberg to Gunvald Larsson in "The Abominable Man," very near the end.

"Keep your peace in front of men and slander them behind their backs," Kollberg said. "Do you know what that is, Larsson?"

Gunvald Larsson looked at him for a long time.

"This isn't Moscow or Peking," he said then, with unusual severity. "The cabbies don't read Gorky here, and the cops don't quote Lenin. This is an insane city in a country that's mentally deranged. And up there on the roof there's some poor damned lunatic and now it's time to bring him down."

"Quite right," said Kollberg. "For that matter, it wasn't Lenin."

"I know."

"What the hell are you talking about?" said Malm nervously.

Neither of them even looked at him.

So what the hell were they talking about?

Yes, I know, it's about Larsson saying it was a mistake for Beck to go up onto the roof alone and Kollberg, who never liked Larrson, defending his friend Beck's decision.

Malm could see that, too.

But what the hell . . . . ?

Cabbies, Gorky, and Lenin - or not Lenin - in Peking and Moscow?

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, 1971.

Puny French student demos against the FN

French students are notoriously stupid.

Think of 1968.

French rally against National Front

Also, the headline is typical BBC bullshit leftism.

"French rally," indeed.

A few thousand students in sparsely scattered demos.

Sometimes capitalism is fun

Google to build self-driving cars

Why it doesn’t pay to read political commentary by partisans

They need an enema, every one.

The Origins of the Modern GOP

Their case, in a nutshell.

American evangelicals were OK with Roe.

According to BooMan,

It was actually a ruling by the DC District Court upholding the Internal Revenue Service's decision to revoke Bob Jones University's tax exemption that convinced evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich to rally the religious right against President Jimmy Carter's reelection.

They could hardly make Bob Jones' anti-miscegenation their rallying call, however, so the modern-day Republican Party was founded on an evangelical "awakening" on what had formerly been considered an issue [abortion] only for "papists."

Today, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen is the party of Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich.

The party of Lincoln is now the party of voter ID laws.

The conclusion is that culture wars issues of the sexual revolution are fake and the Republican Party in general and the religious right in particular are really only a bunch of racists.

The source

What?

Not insane, woman-hating phallocrats?

America won't walk the walk.

Obama: US must show restraint abroad

Katty Kay has it right.

Liars, liars, pants on fire

Typical lie of the American right

The Lesson of the EU Election

False equivalence, rejection of the EU = rejection of progressivism, the welfare state, redistributionism, etc.

Typical lie of the American left

False equivalence, rejection of the EU = racism.

Why the stories about this kid just won’t stop

Femophobe

The right says a culture drenched in sex and without Christian morality made him do it. Culture war!

The left says it’s the misogynist culture and runaway, wicked male sexuality. War on women!

Platonist materialism?

Sentient meat?

Meat and electricity?

Very well.

So much for the res cogitans.

But abstracta, appearances, and the phenomenal realm remain.

Indeed, the world of matter and energy, of space and science, remains a mere posited noumenon, dependent on the categories of human thought, the scope of human imagination, and the material of human, sensuous intuition.

And yet, we suppose there is trans-phenomenal reality.

Apology? Really?

She'd be squatting naked in the dirt if the Europeans hadn't shown up.

Unless the Japanese had colonized the place.

Toxic? Marine Le Pen's Front National

Nationalism with a human face?

Odd bedfellow for the more firmly neoliberal populist right like Wilders' PVV.

Too, Wilders is a firm Zionist.

Interesting.

Le Pen has called for Hollande to dissolve the government and call new elections.

Hell will freeze over before the French "respectable" parties allow her a shot.

They might even prefer unconstitutional action to stop her.

Why not?

They're on their fifth republic.

Who's to say it's not time for a new directory, to be followed by a sixth?

Euroskeptics triumphant, PVV crash and burn

"I told you so," says everyone who advised against alignment with the French FN rather than the tremendously successful UKIP.

Fiddlesticks.

The FN was also hugely successful.

Europe.

Netherlands.

This is not victory.

This is only a step forward for the Euroskeptic cause.

Victory would sink the EU, end immigration, and commence mass deportations.

Could they really get that far, having spent decades giving enormous wealth and power to Islam?

When is the next British national election, by the way?

Or French?

La Fontaine

4/20, The Miser Who Lost His Treasure

Written in an age when medicine could do nothing for the old, and charged accordingly.

By a man who gave no thought to the costs of home care for, say, stroke victims.

Acts and omissions

True enough, you are just as dead if your government does not save you as you would be if it killed you.

But you do not always, at every moment of your life, need it to save you.

You always need it not to kill you.

A thought with "Humanism and Terror" in mind.

National security, privacy, and the constitution

Checks and balances, anyone?

A life tenured and independent judiciary enforcing a written constitution with a lovely Bill of Rights will save us from a runaway executive, right?

After all, that is their critical role in defending the people against tyranny by forcing lawfulness upon the king's men.

Though Madison insisted there was absolutely no cause for alarm and no need at all for a Bill of Rights, we have come over two centuries to recognize the essential role they play in enabling judges to do anything at all to restrain the executive.

But refusing to court the public humiliation of being ignored, rather than fight such atrocities as this - and how long did the president's men hold Bradley Manning in jail, in solitary, without bail, before giving him the speedy and public trial that was his due? - our courts themselves join in the national fun-fest of constitutional disobedience, to the applause of the executive they should be trying to restrain, by everywhere unlawfully legalizing gay marriage.

Politics and greed in licensing

Every five years I get a renewal notice in the mail for my driver's license.

I can mail a check or renew online with a credit card.

But if I want to cancel the motorcycle endorsement - it costs an extra $35 - I have to drive to a DMV office and wait in line to deal with a surly and stupid civil servant.

I can't do that online. 

Every couple of years my license to carry a concealed weapon (a gun) expires.

To renew, I have to go to a nasty hole in the wall office of the sheriff's department, get a picture taken, fill out a form, and pay on the spot.

Six Gnossiennes

Awesome.

Richard Dawkins and Mark Twain

This ought to be different.

Will we see him soon at the top of the ticket?

Julian Castro

Hillary is just so last century.

Have it your own way

Swedish madness.

In the face of the world's worst global murder-suicide cult, Islam.

The worst.

Talk about blame shifting

How America Treats Illegal Aliens Vs. Veterans

Elsewhere, they report with outrage that inmates at Guantanamo are better cared for than vets reliant on the VA.

All Obama’s fault.

All the Democrats’ fault.

No hint that it has been the Republicans all along who have been out to starve government and drown it in the bathtub, VA included.

That the Republicans have been at war with the very idea of the VA, which they claim ought not to exist and have starved of funds.

Not a peep.

Oh.

Benghazi, Benghazi, too.

Morality, propaganda, power, coercion, violence

The Case for Reparations

Balls. 

Would they really rather their ancestors had been left in Africa?  

Pshaw.

There are no moral debts.

If there were, on most accounts there would be none owed by the whole of today’s white population to the whole of today’s black (or other) population of America, anyway.

Consider whites who arrived from elsewhere yesterday.

Consider the descendants of whites who arrived from elsewhere at any time since the collapse of Jim Crow.

Consider the descendants of whites who arrived at any time after the civil war.

Do whites with a dozen generations of exploited proletarians for ancestors owe something?

Whites who, even today, are among the neglected and abandoned of this country?

The white guys I see carrying signs at the intersections at which I stop on the drive home at night, signs saying “Homeless. Please help”?

To the whole thing I say, Pshaw.

Might there be anything owed by American blacks to whites?

Might there be anything owed by today’s African blacks to today’s American blacks?

Nonsense, too, of course.

But you tell me why people who spout his kind of nonsense are treated by the media at least with respect, but people who urge the opposite nonsense are branded – by Coates and his allies! – racists and driven from the public square.

Why did the Atlantic gladly provide the space?

Never mind.

We all know the answers.

Did I actually read his argument?

Certainly not.

I am old, and I have read too many for that hateful claim already.

Life is too short.

All moral beliefs, codes, and judgments are, like all religions, bunk.

It does not follow that no religions are more dangerous or hamful than others. 

Likewise moral codes, ideologies, political philosophies, and judgments are not all on a par.

P since Q. And guns.

The Second Amendment

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

A hypothetical imperative does not become assertoric merely because someone alleges the antecedent.

That is to say, the consequent is not detached merely on that account.

Not even if the one alleging is the one who uttered the imperative in the first place.

True enough, if Mom says “Come inside if the grass is wet” she is apt to be cross if she comes to believe, though falsely, that the grass is wet, and you have stayed outside.

She will think, in that case, that you are a wicked child.

But even so, though you linger in dry fields to her annoyance you do not thereby disobey.

And the case is not different if she believes the grass is wet when she says “Come inside if the grass is wet.”

Not even if she says it’s wet, right then, within your hearing.

But the case is very different if she says “The grass is wet. Come inside.”

Then, the command is unconditional, though accompanied by an assertion of what she takes to be a reason for issuing it that happens to be false.

Then, indeed, you are a wicked child if you remain outside in the bone-dry grass.

So how are you to understand her when she says, to your confusion, “Since the grass it wet, come inside”?

Is that the same as “The grass is wet; come inside”?

Or as “The grass is wet; if the grass is wet come inside”?

As a purely practical matter you should probably go inside, yes.

But suppose Mom, as soon as she spoke, left on vacation, leaving your elder sister to enforce her will, though she understands perfectly well that the grass is not wet?

Is she to take the imperative content of Mom’s utterance to be assertoric or merely hypothetical?

Is she to think you must come inside, and she must make you come inside, regardless of whether the grass is wet, all because Mom absurdly thought it was?

Or that, since the grass is dry, you need not come inside and she need not try to make you?

Politics is an excuse for psychopaths to torture the rest of us

Florida pol

In the spirit of minding our own business?

But this is not an anti-interventionist site, is it?

The American Spectator offers a plan for Mr. Modi, India's new PM

Just in case all India was waiting with baited breath for this American conservative magazine to check in.

Secret trials? Secret evidence?

Closed Circuit

Not in a federal case.

Not with this constitution.

The Sixth Amendment

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

I don't see a waiver there for national security or for anything else.

Do you?

By any means necessary?

No holds barred?

Stop at nothing?

Not under this constitution.

No excuses; no exceptions.

Remember this when those fanatics for constitutionalism at the National Review or the Weekly Standard start bellowing about secret trials, or trials with very special rules of evidence, for terrorists.

Or no trials at all!

The Fifth Amendment

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

I don't see permission there to indefinitely detain people without trial under any circumstances, whatever.

While it wasn't totally crazy to behave as though the US was at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban and many others fighting in Iraq, back in the day, we are well past that day.

After a while, endless prolongation of a "state of war" that is nothing but an excuse to deny their rights to people playing any role, however merely supportive, in one particular class of criminal acts distinguished from other forms of criminal violence only by motive, terrorism, begins to look like what it really is, a lie made up to excuse evasion of the clear mandates of the constitution.

Take that up with John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham.

Tom Wolf bought the Pennsylvania Democrat nomination for governor

Tom Wolf easily wins Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania governor

He won because he used a lot of his own money to out-spend the others, and his advertising started much sooner than theirs.

He is a reasonably personable fellow and on the issues he’s a standard liberal Democrat.

That means he aims to please feminists, gays, and non-whites above all, while upholding national and state progressivism.

He beat one man and two women for the nomination.

He is certainly much preferable to his Republican opponent, the incumbent Tom Corbett.

OK, so that’s what you guys want

Study Gives E-Cigarettes Edge in Helping Smokers Quit

According to the advertising and to everyone I know who has switched from smoking to e-cigarettes, the point is to stop doing something terribly dangerous while continuing to enjoy a pleasant addiction, indefinitely.

But the medical professionals and others who think it’s their job to save you from yourself don’t seem interested in that.

After all, addiction is just bad and people who sell addictive substances are wicked, aren’t they?

Even if the addiction is (a) as close to harmless, say, as drinking coffee and (b) actually quite cheap, if the addicts are not exploited as they usually are when their addiction is to cigarettes, booze, or anything else politicians and doctors can safely call “sin” and tax at ridiculous rates.

Yes, I see.

The constitution was conspicuous by its absence

Say "No" to the popular vote

In a comment to their post I wrote,

Conspicuous by its absence from your argument is the perfectly valid constitutional point that the votes of the Electors cannot be bound.

That is, there is no such thing as a faithless Elector.

The point of the EC was to give the power of choosing the president and the VP to the Electors, whose votes can no more be constrained by state legislators than can those of senators (originally chosen by those same legislatures) or representatives.

In our republic, neither the people nor the states choose the president and VP.

The Electors do.

And nobody else.

Steve M stands up for the rulers of China. The post-communist Communist Party, that is.

Maybe the difference is that elites in China and Singapore aren't trying to destroy their own countries

No need to read the post.

That’s his title on it, and the comparison is with American elites.

But I couldn't resist the temptation to quote this bit.

He's commenting on an article by David Brooks in which DB's admiration for capitalist, technocrat dictatorship is on display.

(Brooks isn't concerned that it is still the Communist Party that rules China.)

Brooks laments American influence-group politics -- but he says countries like Singapore and China are corrupt, too.

So what difference does it make how palms get greased?

I think the difference is that, in Singapore and China, what powerful interest groups want isn't allowed to trump the best interests of the nation.

It seems to me that there's more of a sense that the powerful forces in business and government are trying to row in the same direction.

So there you have it.

Looks to me like Steve M actually shares DB's admiration.

Looking for someone to blame

A legendary failure of liberalism

I have every confidence Pat Buchanan in foro interno attributes these differences in performance to the combined influence of native endowment and incompetent parenting.

But the impossibility of him saying so, and of his readers thinking so, provides him an excellent opportunity to point the finger, no doubt with glee at the poetic justice of the thing, at liberals.

How will it be possible to blame these performance disparities on racism when the schools in which they occur are governed by non-white politicians, staffed by non-white teachers and administrators, and filled with overwhelmingly non-white students?

Don't worry.

They'll find a way.

The right has its own styles of constitutional disobedience founded in its own constitutional lies

What the Left Gets Wrong About Constitutionalism

Yes, actually, more than one style, depending on who you ask and which lies you pick.

This fellow defends libertarian lies.

Richard Epstein has published a massive scholarly tome laying out the case for enforcing the Constitution in a way that recognizes its foundation in the principles of individual rights and limited government.

But that’s not obedience, either.

Today’s libertarian reading rests on such absurdities as the substantive due process of the Lochner era and the CATO reading of the privileges or immunities clause of the 14^th Amendment as imposing relevant portions of the Bill of Rights and constitutional protections on the states.

It's not fidelity to the constitution and it's not honest constitutionalism.

And it forgets such signal historical facts as that the states reserved to themselves powers no one intended to deny them, subject to whatever restrictions might exist in their own constitutions, such as the power to establish religion.

And that barely scratches the surface.

Everyone lies, right and left.

This is what happens when you starve socialism

VA scandal

What did they think was going to happen, the lawmakers who cut and cut and cut budgets, again and again?

They starve the VA and now profess shock and outrage at the inevitable, wholly predictable result?

What a bunch of fakers.

What is the Supreme Court’s real job? (Says who?)

Holder attacks Roberts by name, supports Sotomayor

Attacking racial inequalities, apparently, always presumed to stem from malicious, unfounded, and unjust discrimination, and also attacking that discrimination itself, is job one.

Or anyway it's toward the top of the list, well above adhering to the constitution, though neither Holder nor other leading officials, especially in law enforcement, are going quite yet to put it quite that way.

How long will it be before left wing law enforcement officials, attorneys general, or even judges begin to come clean and urge frank constitutional disobedience, following Louis Michael Seidman, I wonder?

Anyway, Roberts evidently doesn’t share Holder's view.

So Roberts, by name, is the enemy.

DeWayne Wickham couldn’t agree more.

Gary Younge on institutional racism

And how often have you heard of the racism of "disparate racial impact"?

Paranoid supposition of hidden, malicious intent?

Or persuasive definition (vide Charles Stevenson)?

Intentionally unresolved ambiguity, I think, giving greater apparent legitimacy to complaint and blame.

And so, political mendacity.

Fiction and truth

Could there be an historical novel about the Battle of Waterloo in which not one sentence was true?

Yes, of course.

Imagine a novel in which everything said about the battle in the author's narration is at least a bit off the mark.

The time or date of the beginning is wrong.

The description of Wellington is not quite right.

The composition and number of the opposing forces was not as the novel says.

And so on.

But there was a Battle of Waterloo, and it pit Wellington against Napoleon.

And Napoleon lost.

And the novel, though it does not assert these true things, asserts what entails them.

But then what, really, is the tie to truth that makes a novel about Waterloo about Waterloo, rather than some wholly fictitious battle on the third moon of Jupiter, known for some reason by that name?

Sure, there is a tie.

But what is it?

What is the connection to reality that makes a novel set in New York set in New York, rather than in a town by that name on the frontier on Venus?

Unadmitted bedfellows

They have no trouble accepting that Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot who led vast, popular movements of awful violence whose only legacies were social disasters on an unprecedented scale were men of the left.

Indeed, the greatness of those disasters, their unprecedented cost, magnitude, and body count, were all due specifically to the most leftist traits of their regimes.

More than anything else, it was through their radical leftism that they did such epochal harm.

And yet, almost no one "serious" accepts the evident truth that both Mussolini and Hitler, like Bismarck, like Teddy Roosevelt, were men of the left.

Or that Fascism and Nazism - National Socialism - were leftist movements.

But of course it was not owing to their leftist features that these regimes were and were regarded as radical or extreme, or that, anyway in Hitler's case, their movements were so spectacularly malevolent and caused such historic disasters.

Of the communists we can say they were horrors because they were leftist and that their historic and successful malevolence was intrinsically leftist.

Whereas Hitler's evil and the malevolence of Hitlerism owed nothing to the modest leftism of the man, the ideology, or the regime.

And as to Mussolini, well.

Neither he, nor Franco, nor the other non-communist movements or dictators of the period should even be mentioned in the same discussion with Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

Evil for evil, body counts and all else considered, they are orders of magnitude inferior to the communists as producers of social devastation.

Like Salazar and Peron, and the whole tribe of Latin non-communists.

Or Chiang Kai Shek, of course.

Or the generals or princes who occasionally rule various places in Southeast Asia.

Many of whom have been and continue to be men of the left every bit as clearly and seriously as Bismarck and Mussolini.

But not men of the radical left.

Politics

Politics is a unique struggle of which the winners get to exercise the matchless violence of the state for their own ends.

Hence it brings out the worst in us and attracts the worst of us.

Mass politics, even democratic politics, is no exception.

Nor is culture war or class war.

Most certainly not.

The New Rome

Socially, economically, and culturally, the America of the Founders was a lot like the Rome of the republican period, and they knew it well.

An agricultural economy based on draft animals, ubiquitous slavery, a barbarian frontier, and woman's place not much different from what it had been in Rome.

Everything softened a bit by Christianity, of course.

Slavery was in some ways less brutal, for example, and its sexual aspect much suppressed.

No gladiators or animal slaughters.

And definitely no executions by crucifixion, even of the worst offenders.

And it is interesting that that felt resemblance those Protestants and deists so much insisted on, they and all their successors before the Civil War, was very clearly with pagan, republican Rome and not with the later Christian - that is to say, Catholic - Rome of Constantine and the emperors after him.

Constantine the Great, whose perhaps apocryphal motto In Hoc Signo Vinces adorns my class ring from the Jesuit school, The College of the Holy Cross.

And it was not as if they unanimously, unambiguously rejected Rome's imperialism.

Far from it!

But the empire of the Romans had been built mostly by the republic.

And they had just fought a rather desperate war against heavy odds for independence during which, despite lingering and frank admiration on the political right, those medieval features of the British state, monarchy, aristocracy, and quasi-theocracy, had all become synonyms for tyranny and oppression for nearly all Americans.

Leaving quite aside the obvious religious reasons for this Protestant society not much more than a century away from the bloody European convulsions brought on by the Reformation to feel precious little kinship with the Rome that created Catholic Christendom, there was ample reason for early America to see itself in the mirror of republican Rome.

And now?

Two hundred years of unprecedented and unprecedentedly fast scientific, technical, economic, and cultural change have put so vast a distance between us and the early Americans as to make the differences between them and Rome seem as small to us as they did to them.

They are very nearly no more like us than the Rome Livy wrote of and Machiavelli commented on.

And their political insights, concerns, and judgments can no more bind us, serve as models for us, or form the horizon of our own than those of Plutarch, Cicero, or Arrian.

Like the Romans they so proudly resembled, the Founders for us, and even the America they created, are so much ancient history.

A point to bear in mind when confronting the endless controversies about the compliance of our republic with the constitution they wrote for their America.

Or silly laments that our society, culture, and mores so little resemble those of that America.

Or vicious attacks on America's white people, heaping blame and bitter anger upon them for the deeds of whites dead two centuries and more ago.

Every morning I check

There's no snow in the forecast as far as the eye can see.

It was a rough winter.

The liberation of Poland

From October 30, 1944, anyone who owned a radio of any kind or type without a license faced the death penalty. 

They meant it.

On May 1, 1945, a man in Poznan was executed for unauthorized possession of a Philips radio. 

Reading Iron Curtain.

"Nigger"

But if you cannot even mention the word, let alone use it, but must allude to it by description as we used to speak, for example, of the rise in use by white people of "the mother curse," how awkward must it be nowadays to teach literature.

Twain and Shakespeare must be very difficult.

Is Conrad even possible?

Only just.

The N-Word of the Narcissus.

Awkward, to say the least. 

Unity of apperception

"The 'I think' must accompany all my representations."

Years later, it was discovered that transporter beams had been a Starfleet hoax.

The transporter machine in the Enterprise into which he stepped destroyed Captain Kirk instantly, disintegrating his body to atomic dust to be swept up by that evening's housekeepers and flushed out into space.

The machine in the next starship, ostensibly his destination, simply assembled an entirely new Kirk who would step away believing he had just moments ago finished lunch in an Enterprise snack bar.

What if the unity of apperception is just a mistake and there is no single, continuing 'I' - no me - that is the thinker of all "my" thoughts?

Meat and electricity.

Youth

Immediately after the war, there was a great resurgence of the Scouts and thousands of other youth groups, some of them sponsored by churches or political parties - overwhelmingly, not the communists - , but many of them independent activity groups like athletic, hiking, and chess clubs, throughout Soviet occupied Eastern Europe.

Though governments in the region at this point were democratic coalitions, Stalin, the Red Army, and Soviet-controlled national communist parties together ensured ministries of the interior, police, and the secret police were communist organizations devoted and obedient to Moscow.

Within a year or so the swarms of independent clubs and organizations had been banned, penetrated, or subverted from within and ultimately absorbed into unified state, and explicitly communist, control.

Always, the struggle involved not only illegal coercive measures by organs of the state under communist control but the sort of ghastly ideological warfare and horrific propaganda made too familiar by the left even in America from the 1960s on.

Culture war every bit as bitter and sweeping, but in a time frame of only the few years immediately after World War Two.

Reading Iron Curtain, one observes the hammering of traditional scouting in our time by the left, for example, with dread.

Lifeboat ethics

As Europe approaches a "Camp of the Saints" situation, it is no surprise that the left sides with the invaders who will soon overwhelm and destroy the place.

Ask any lefty Jesus lover

Violence and religious authoritarianism are gross perversions of Christianity.

Well, anyway, of the religion of Jesus, or even the religion about Jesus of the early church.

But this is not true of Islam, though many pretend it is.

Neither of the religion of Muhammed nor of the religion about Muhammed.

Perhaps usually without believing their own pretense.

Who can tell?

In any case, this may be one of those true things one simply cannot say.

The world is full of them.

The Informer

She took the trouble to rat him out.

In a private conversation - but not surreptitious, and in a public place - she overheard him call the president a nigger.

It was too much for her.

An outraged public has responded.

(No, this is not the movie starring Victor McLaglen.)

Weakening of the will to live? Maybe not.

Young marrieds each think secretly, regarding the other, "I hope I out-live you."

But geezers each hope to die first, and even say so.

The young are thinking of what it is to be alive and young.

The old are thinking of what it is to be old and alone.

The final evolutionary refutation

What if humanity ultimately dies out from its intelligence?

It has often been suggested we might exterminate ourselves through nuclear war, pollution, or some 12 Monkeys scenario.

But what if we just die out for lack of reproduction?

Feminism, contraception, easy divorce, the rejection of marriage, abortion, and a universal preference for recreational and not reproductive sex, enabled by science, the atheism of the ruling class, and the egoism of most believers, could do it, eventually.

Even after the lesson Das Untergang des Abendlands will provide, the rest of humanity could eventually follow.

Not that such an end for humanity would be so awful.

Eventually, the sun would blow up and kill us all, anyway, if we lasted that long.

And, anyway, each of us dies once, and only once, regardless of the eventual finish of the species that nearly none of us will live to see.

If

If America was a democracy every Muslim here would have been deported in the first week after 9/11 and not one stadium would have been built with public funds, ever.

Just saying.

The price of secularist imperialism

Had the Crusaders won back from Islam all the previously Christian lands taken and converted by violence by the Mohammetans from their first appearance, the world today would be a better place.

The Christians would have reduced Islam to an impotent, cringing minority, incapable of all the harm it has done from that time to the present.

But it was the secular empires of the 19th Century that defeated Islam almost everywhere.

Wrong men for the job.

Islam.

Lies, damned lies, punditry, editorializing, and news accounts

Ann Coulter on the opposition to the death penalty

Specifically regarding their reaction to the Lockett execution.

AC's allusions to common methods of abortion are wholly in place, here, and her scorn for liberal hand-wringing about Lockett's presumed suffering is quite apt.

Bork and Thomas are wrong

Brown-ian Motions

Babble about equality and discrimination notwithstanding, the equal protection clause is about the protection against crime the law affords, and that has nothing to do with segregation, legally permitted or legally required, by private or public institutions or persons.

“De facto segregation” is not segregation but mere non-integration.

As to Williamson’s apparent concern to equalize education by equalizing funding, it is far more appearance than reality.

Vouchers and choice would almost certainly insure growing educational inequality just as vouchers and choice in place of Medicare or Medicaid would ensure growing inequality of access to medical care, in both cases through shrinkage in the value of the vouchers compared to prices.

In any case, a good reason to think so is that conservatives, who make no secret of loathing redistribution as well as regulation and the taxation that enables both, support it.

The idea is that, here as elsewhere, people can obtain only what goods or services they can personally pay for with whatever they can legally get from the economic marketplace or the gift of others – such as, for example, their filthy rich parents in the cases of such people as the Fords, the Kennedy’s, the Forbes’s, and the entire tribe of silver-spoon babies.

Too, that is the point of privatization in all areas from fire departments to highways.

(As to the latter, it is also the point of tolling.)

A regime of “user fees” is a regime affording maximum advantage to wealth over poverty.

A regime of access open to all on the basis of need is the abolition of that advantage.

It's nothing. A woman drowned.

Fable 3/16, La femme noyee.

First, there is the rather brutal misogyny of the saw he refuses.

But then it turns out the illustration and the moral are only more gently misogynist.

Not that I mind a dose of misogyny, now and again, unless it's overdone. 

That's thanks to feminism, by the way, much as my racism, such as it is, is a response to the race hatred of whites by other races.

Fed by liberals, of course, much like feminist man-hating.

Liberal euro-whites and liberal men.

Is misogyny a standard theme of pessimist writing, l wonder?

Think of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

Ie ne ſuis pas de ceux qui diſent,

    Ce n’eſt rien ;

C’eſt une femme qui ſe noye.

Je dis que c’eſt beaucoup ; & ce ſexe vaut bien

Que nous le regrettions, puiſqu’il fait nôtre joye.

Ce que j’avance icy n’eſt point hors de propos ;

    Puiſqu’il s’agit dans cette Fable

    D’une femme qui dans les flots

Avoit fini ſes jours par un ſort déplorable,

    Son Epoux en cherchoit le corps,

    Pour luy rendre en cette avanture

    Les honneurs de la ſepulture.

    Il arriva que ſur les bords

    Du fleuve auteur de ſa diſgrace

Des gens ſe promenoient, ignorans l’accident.

    Ce mary donc leur demandant

S’ils n’avoient de ſa femme apperçu nulle trace ;

Nulle, reprit l’un d’eux ; mais cherchez-la plus bas ;

    Suivez le fil de la riviere.

Un autre repartit : Non, ne le ſuivez pas ;

    Rebrouſſez plutoſt en arriere.

Quelle que ſoit la pente & l’inclination

    Dont l’eau par ſa courſe l’emporte,

    L’eſprit de contradiction

    L’aura fait floter d’autre ſorte.

Cet homme ſe railloit aſſez hors de ſaiſon.

    Quant à l’humeur contrediſante,

    Je ne ſçay s’il avoit raiſon.

    Mais que cette humeur ſoit, ou non,

    Le défaut du ſexe & ſa pente,

    Quiconque avec elle naiſtra,

    Sans faute avec elle mourra,

    Et juſqu’au bout contredira,

    Et, s’il peut, encor par-delà.

In Praise of King Log

La Fontaine, 3/4.

LES GRENOUILLES QUI DEMANDENT UN ROI

            Les Grenouilles, se lassant

            De l'état démocratique,

            Par leurs clameurs firent tant

Que Jupin les soumit au pouvoir monarchique.

Il leur tomba du ciel un Roi tout pacifique :

Ce roi fit toutefois un tel bruit en tombant,

            Que la gent marécageuse,

            Gent fort sotte et fort peureuse,

            S'alla cacher sous les eaux,

            Dans les joncs, dans les roseaux,

            Dans les trous du marécage,

Sans oser de longtemps regarder au visage

Celui qu'elles croyaient être un géant nouveau ;

            Or c'était un Soliveau,

De qui la gravité fit peur à la première

            Qui, de le voir s'aventurant 

            Osa bien quitter sa tanière.

            Elle approcha, mais en tremblant.

Une autre la suivit, une autre en fit autant,

            Il en vint une fourmilière ;

Et leur troupe à la fin se rendit familière,

       Jusqu'à sauter sur l'épaule du Roi.

Le bon Sire le souffre et se tient toujours coi.

Jupin en a bientôt la cervelle rompue :

Donnez-nous, dit ce peuple, un Roi qui se remue.

Le Monarque des Dieux leur envoie une Grue,

            Qui les croque, qui les tue,

            Qui les gobe à son plaisir,

            Et Grenouilles de se plaindre ;

Et Jupin de leur dire : Eh quoi ! votre désir

        À ses lois croit-il nous astreindre ?

        Vous avez dû premièrement

        Garder votre gouvernement  ;

Mais ne l'ayant pas fait, il vous devait suffire

Que votre premier Roi fut débonnaire et doux :

            De celui-ci contentez-vous,

            De peur d'en rencontrer un pire.

The translator, Christopher Wood, remarks that the moral of the fable condemns monarchy, representing the utter inactivity of the utmost indifference as the best that can be hoped for from a king.

That is true.

But the pessimism runs deeper than that.

The direct target, after all, is the folly of the many who, forsaking democracy, demand to be ruled by an autocrat.

In any case, though La Fontaine has made it his own, the fable originates with Aesop.

Google "King Log."

La Fontaine on Death

Two Fables of La Fontaine, inspired by one of Aesop's

Both versions exaggerate the value of mere life, the tenacity of the will to live, or fear of death.

DEATH AND THE WRETCH

A wretch, who in misfortunes pined,

Daily invoked the aid of Death :

“ Come quick,” he said, “I yield my breath ;

Come, lovely Death ! and ease my mind.”

The monarch dire to please him came,

Knocked at the door, announced his name ;

Entered the room and near him drew.—

“ What,” cried he, trembling, “ do I view !

Hence, hideous object, from my sight !

I shake with horror and affright !

O Death, keep off ! Away ! ill-omened wight !”

Mecaenas somewhere thus exclaimed,

Let fate all vigour from my body take,

Let me be gouty, handless, maimed,

Let fate a moving trunk my body make ;

More than content do I the bargain strike,

Never to die.—Many have said the like.

LA MORT ET LE MALHEUREUX

    Un Malheureux appelait tous les jours

              La mort à son secours;

    Ô Mort, lui disait-il, que tu me sembles belle !

Viens vite, viens finir ma fortune cruelle.

La mort crut en venant, l'obliger en effet.

Elle frappe à sa porte, elle entre, elle se montre.

    Que vois-je ! cria-t-il, ôtez-moi cet objet ;

         Qu'il est hideux ! que sa rencontre

         Me cause d'horreur et d'effroi !

N'approche pas, ô Mort ; ô Mort, retire-toi.

         Mécénas fut un galant homme :

Il a dit quelque part : Qu'on me rende impotent,

Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme

Je vive, c'est assez, je suis plus que content.

Ne viens jamais, ô Mort ; on t'en dit tout autant.

DEATH AND THE WOODMAN

A woodman poor, and sunk in years and woes,

Groaned with the load his weary hands had cut.

Bowed down beneath Time's many-handed blows,

With painful steps he sought his smoky hut.

            At last lie could no farther go—

Laid down his load, reflected on his woe ;

What earthly pleasure had he ever found !

Lived there a poorer wretch this world around !

Often no bread—through wakeful nights oppressed ;

Wife, children, soldiers, taxes, and the rest.

What gloomier picture could his fancy draw ?

He called on Death, and soon the monarch saw.

“What do you want ? ” he asked, as near he strode.

“Please,” said the man, “ help me to raise my load.”

            Death comes, a cure for every cry ;

            Yet we recoil and doubt his skill,

            And trembling hold our motto still,

                Rather to suffer than to die.

LA MORT ET LE BÛCHERON

Un pauvre bûcheron, tout couvert de ramée,

Sous le faix du fagot aussi bien que des ans

Gémissant et courbé, marchait à pas pesants,

Et tâchait de gagner sa chaumine enfumée.

Enfin, n'en pouvant plus d'effort et de douleur,

Il met bas son fagot, il songe à son malheur.

Quel plaisir a-t-il eu depuis qu'il est au monde ?

En est-il un plus pauvre en la machine ronde ?

Point de pain quelquefois, et jamais de repos.

Sa femme, ses enfants, les soldats, les impôts,

              Le créancier et la corvée

Lui font d'un malheureux la peinture achevée.

Il appelle la Mort ; elle vient sans tarder,

               Lui demande ce qu'il faut faire.

               C'est, dit-il, afin de m'aider

A recharger ce bois ; tu ne tarderas guère.

                  Le trépas vient tout guérir ;

                  Mais ne bougeons d'où nous sommes :

                  Plutôt souffrir que mourir,

                  C'est la devise des hommes.

Aesop’s, in one of many English translations.

The Old Man and Death

An Old Man cut himself a bundle of sticks in a wood and started to carry them home.

He had a long way to go, and was tired out before he had got much more than half-way.

Casting his burden on the ground, he called upon Death to come and release him from his life of toil.

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when, much to his dismay, Death stood before him and professed his readiness to serve him.

He was almost frightened out of his wits, but he had enough presence of mind to stammer out, "Good sir, if you'd be so kind, pray help me up with my burden again."

Live forever, no matter what?

Pshaw.

Consider Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease), or any number of other fates that pretty much erase us without necessarily actually killing us.

Well, live forever if you keep your youth and health?

A theme taken up by Beauvoir in an interesting 1946 novel.

Tous les hommes sont mortels

And others in other literary forms.

The Makropulos Affair

Including philosophical essays like this famous one by Bernard Williams

Unbearable whiteness?

The Unbearable Whiteness of Liberal Media

For about a hundred years they have been way disproportionately – in some venues overwhelmingly – Jewish.

It was considered – by liberals – very un-PC to even notice.

Imagine the response if somebody had ever written a piece titled “The Unbearable Jewishness of Liberal Media,” complaining of, well, its Jewishness.

BooMan: Anyone who disagrees with us is a dunce or a fraud.

Booman on Marco Rubio and climate change

They have long taken to labeling climate change incredulity "denialism" so as to make it seem not only a fraud but a fraud morally on a par with Holocaust denial.

And that, in liberal eyes, of course makes it very bad, indeed.

Speaking as an atheist . . . . .

Bill Maher, again

Islam is the most violent, imperialist, brutal, and totalitarian of all the Abrahamic religions and without question the most vicious, dangerous, and murderous cult in the world, today.

But it only matters because the West’s need for oil has made Islam rich and powerful and poured hundreds of billions into support of Islamic craziness.

Were it not for oil money, the most deliberately backward culture in the world would be an object of universal pity and contempt, but not of fear.

Who says Maureen D isn’t a feminist?

With malice toward nuns

He doesn’t do it often, but every time this guy affirms some doctrine, dogma, or feature of the church they hate the liberals or, as in this case, the feminists pull out that self-same club, the same big stick they have used to beat him since he first appeared as a likely new pope.

The Argentine “dirty war.”

Well, for you that could be right

"The point is not to understand the world but to change it."

So said Marx.

"Theses Against Feuerbach," as I recall.

He was exactly wrong.

The point is to understand it.

You cannot change it.

And if you could?

WTF?

The French are selling warships to the Russians.

Tell me again, please.

Why the hell are we in NATO, sworn to defend these euro-loons against the Russians?

Oklahoma punks out

Well, this is annoying.

Oklahoma State court forces 6 month delay of the next and only scheduled execution.

Next up, conservatives will agree the death penalty is unconstitutional.

The only thing they really want to conserve is the money and power of the plutes and the corporations.

That's all that's left of conservatism, almost.

Zionism comes in second.

Hayseed Christianity comes in a distant third.

The liberals are right.

The Republicans are in the hands of Wall Street conservatives too determined to kill a century of progressivism to steal the entire white working class from the Democrats by shifting left on the economy.

The rest of their agenda would be a cinch.

But that would be sacrificing the only real agenda, the destruction of historic progressivism, for the sucker bait.

A man who lived way too long

Lockett and Load

The kind of person BBC admires

Teen vegan fights big corporations

24, the new season

OK, I watched it.

Interesting how often on TV the people with real power in the government are bosses from hell, and then some.

Will Geert Wilders find allies in UKIP and the Front National?

UKIP

So far as I know, these parties of the "extreme right" are united by nationalism, but are by no means alike in everything else.

Wilders' party is strongly Zionist, for example, but I suspect the French FN is not.

Also, Wilders' party is more opposed in general to the welfare state than they are, I think.

Cui bono?

Is Obama wrong?

Once you agree that the Ukraine cannot benefit by any of the suggestions being made by Lindsey Graham and the WSJ you have to ask who does?

The American people certainly would not benefit from the guaranteed embitterment of relations between the US and Russia that would result.

Nor, for that matter, would our European allies.

But the war party and the military-industrial complex most certainly would get a new lease on life, wouldn't they?

Marathon Man

Why are they all global races?

Why aren't any of them strictly national, or even strictly local?

If. But not.

The constitutional prohibition of establishment, I think, requires secularism.

But since the incorporation doctrine is a lie, it requires nothing of Greece, New York, in that vein.

Court allows Christian town prayers

But that isn't what the court said.

The right decision for wrong reasons.

Another step along the way

The walls are made of glass

On the TV this morning it was announced that a Pittsburgh area school, Franklin Regional High School, that recently suffered knife attacks in the halls by a 16 year old student now requires that all students use only plastic, transparent back-packs.

Unusual crimes are now used to edge us closer all the time to the total surveillance state.

Anybody watch "Person of Interest"?

Sooner than you think.

Realer than you think.

Democrats on the wrong side

Go figure.

It's been like this for as long as I've been in Pennsylvania, since the late 1970's.

The Democrats protect the state stores and their monopolistic control of the retail trade in wines and spirits.

Very annoying.

Maybe wait for the movie

Age of Atheists.

A generational difference?

But they're not that much younger than I am.

McCord vs Wolf.

McCord's wife is black?

When I was in high school, it was rare for kids to date outside their ethnic group or their religion.

We are a family of Franco-Americans, of French Catholics from Canada.

My sister married a Franco-American Catholic and my brother did the same.

My high school girlfriend was a Franco-American Catholic who had gone to parochial school for grades 1 through 8, where the language of instruction was French, like all my cousins.

These candidates are maybe 15 years younger, and McCord has taken exogamy that far.

You know, liberals only pretend to value diversity.

Exogamy undermines it.

And they reject it in the schools, too.

Recall the president's comment that religiously affiliated schools are divisive.

What does he think of men's colleges?

Of schools that have been, traditionally, not just racially but ethnically specific?

Though I am sure that, like all liberal men, he is fine with schools that are traditionally black or girls-only.

It's just men's schools that are wicked.

And white schools.

It's masculine identity that needs to be at least subverted if not abolished.

And the boys club.

And the white race.

Not the sisterhood.

And certainly no colored race.