A son's a piece cut off

Fathers and Sons.

After three days,  Bazarov leaves.

After three years, three days is not much.

His father is in despair.

His mother says,

"What's to be done, Vasya? A son's a piece cut off. He's like a falcon: he comes and goes whenever he likes; while you and I are like mushrooms growing in the hollow of a log; we sit side by side and never budge. Except that I'll always be here for you, as you will for me."

It was the right thing to do

Fathers and Sons.

Basarov tells Arkady his (B's) father has had one of his peasants flogged, but it's all right, the fellow is a drunkard and a thief.

Revolutionary justice.

Bazarov has a moment of clarity

Fathers and Sons.

Arkady: "Russia will attain perfection when the poorest peasant has a house like that and each one of us should help bring that about."

Bazarov: "I've conceived a hatred for the poorest peasant . . . . those for whom I'm supposed to jump out of my skin and who won't even thank me for it . . . . Besides, what the hell do I need his thanks for? So, he'll be living in a fine white hut while I'm pushing up burdock; well, then what ?"

Omniscient observer

About Odintsova the narrator says, "Like all women who never managed to fall in love, she longed for something without knowing precisely what it was."

Fathers and Sons, Turgenev.

All the same, she rejects Bazarov after extracting a declaration of love from the fellow.

"No," she decided once and for all, "God knows where it might have led; one mustn't fool around with this kind of thing; serenity is still better than anything else on earth [sic]."

In this same few pages, Arkady meets and begins a quieter affection for her younger sister, Katya.

Those are the two most important events of the novel, and they fall at its exact center.

How formally pleasant. 

Well, good luck

The self-loathing of the British Left is now a problem for us all

Don't be silly; they don't loathe themselves.

It's not better in America.

And there's nothing you can do about it; you've already lost.

Abortion rights - and duties?

Why the atheist call to abort the disabled is doomed

Says the outraged author, Naomi Shaffer Riley,

“Abort it and try again.”

Those were the recent words of Richard Dawkins, responding to a tweet from a woman who said she would see it as “a real ethical dilemma” if she became pregnant with a baby with Down syndrome.

Actually, not quite.

What he said was, "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice," when he might simply have asked, "If abortion is lawful and otherwise not objectionable, why not abort and try again?"

For what emergency were you saving your precious abortion rights, in other words?

Women who have the option pretty much everywhere exercise it to avoid having children with serious birth defects or genetic disorders.

Some do it to select for sex.

By no mean all do it to avoid having the child of a rapist or a casual sex partner, perhaps of the wrong race, though of course some do.

Or as a form of family planning, to avoid have too many children.

But so far as I know only liberals have suggested women have a moral duty not to give birth to defective children.

[David Benatar says women have a moral duty not to give birth to any children. Quite a different thing.]

And, as in the present case, rest that claim on the argument that the child's life would be so awful it would be wrong to "bring it into the world."

That is, wrong not to kill it while it's still out of sight.

Anyway, I am unaware of any reasons why life is especially awful for people with Down's Syndrome, though I suppose that's possible.

And I quite agree that in some cases abortion can be a kindness, as can infanticide or, in later life, euthanasia.

But is a life with Down's Syndrome really so bad as to make abortion seem a kindness?

I doubt it.

This is a case where the parents have an opportunity to spare themselves an unwanted burden, or simply an unwanted feature in any child of theirs.

I can well understand the PC morality police going out of their way to provide moral cover for such a choice.

But this goes beyond that and makes it a positive duty.

And so I suspect RD of unspoken eugenicist bias and a willingness to urge upon us morals tending toward improvement of the species, as measured by commonly held values like intelligence, say.

Ah, well.

Culture wars.

Liberals just don't get it. They don't get any of it.

When Whites Just Don’t Get It

He writes, as though he expected readers to be amazed,

[A] 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism.

Yes, you read that right!

 

And he goes on to repeat the endlessly repeated, stupid, and vicious black/liberal blood libel, attributing every failing of black America to white racism.

Ebola catchup

Ebola spreads to Nigeria oil hub 

Senegal confirms first Ebola case

Guinea riot over Ebola disinfectant

Anti-Feminism

Proudhon was an anti-feminist ?

Reading Fathers and Sons.

Turgenev off-handedly presents a physically unattractive, radical, liberated woman as a reader of Fenimore Cooper and an admirer of Emerson, who says that about the French anarchist.

Reportedly, Nietzsche was also a great fan of the American clerical essayist.

Makes sense.

How he flattered intellectuals !

Secular prophets, they conceive themselves.

Or secular mullahs, more like.

What a vast will to power in these people !

That is how they differ, these intelligentsia, as Marx practically admitted, from real philosophers.

One third of the way through it, the story is about fathers and sons; there are no fathers and daughters in it, though there are several women and one recognizes women have fathers.

The narrator tells us what the men think and feel, speaking almost only of what one could observe - what a man could observe - of the women.

Mostly he does not presume to venture inside their heads, or hearts.

For the censors ?

Bazarov to Arkady about Odintsova.

"Whoever she may be, simply a provincial lioness or an 'emancipated woman' like Kukshina, she still has the nicest pair of shoulders I've seen in a long time."

The next day after a visit he exclaims, "What a body ! Perfect for the dissecting table."

And then, in case you mistook him, "I tell you, she has a delectable body !"

A few days later, Bazarov says this to her, accounting for the difference between the stupid and the clever.

"We know more or less what causes physical ailments; moral illnesses result from bad upbringing, all the nonsense that gets stuffed into people's heads from childhood, in a word, the deformed condition of society. If you correct society you won't have any more illnesses."

Such stupidities have never deserted the left.

When the government of men has been replaced by the enlightened administration of things there will be no coercion and no need for prisons.

They say.

Truth in the wrong place

Obama's 'no strategy' gaffe on IS

There was no gaffe, apart from telling a simple and not surprising truth.

Only langue de bois allowed, thanks.

He had already said in a previous press conference that he and his advisors were considering how to go forward, though at present there are no plans for boots on the ground.

Update.

The shit storm is even worse today than yesterday.

As usual, the war party are furious and hysterical, as though the Islamic State was somewhere in the Appalachians and O was still relying on McClellan.

Reminder, the IS is half a world away, in a part of the world we would not give a shit about, were it not for Israel, American Jews, and oil.

And were it not for the needs of the military-industrial complex.

The hysteria is just screaming, demented propaganda

This is a bit too liberal-interventionist for me, but good on the whole.

The punditry vs. the presidency

What is government for, and who says so?

Aquinas taught that the purpose of law is to make men good as far as possible, in conformity with natural law.

Kant teaches that the purpose of law is to afford men the maximum possible liberty consistent with the like liberty for all.

Liberals traditionally (and nowadays libertarians along with many conservatives) have maintained that the primary – in some cases, the only – political good, the only legitimate aim of the state, is liberty.

Hobbes teaches the first purpose of government is to impose peace and end the war of all against all that confronts mankind in a state of nature, thus guaranteeing the physical safety of its subjects.

Locke and his epigones teach that the purpose of the state is to guarantee to each the safe enjoyment of his natural rights and, specifically, the rights to life, liberty, and (for Locke) property or (for Jefferson, a crucial difference) the pursuit of happiness.

The US Constitution supposes such legitimate aims of government – anyway, the federal government – as are to be found in the preamble, Section 8 of Article I, or elsewhere. 

Numerous more recent political thinkers have held the general welfare, economic equality, or the common good to be legitimate, even overriding political goods.

Others have said the same about self-rule through some form of direct democracy or popular, representative government. 

But all such doctrines and in fact every political philosophy is exposed as fantasy by the teaching of amoralism.

Leaving behind plenty of room for comment on the actual, as opposed to legitimate, aims of the Leviathan. 

Think of Marx, Bakunin, and the view that the state is essentially and only a tool enabling exploitation by a ruling class. 

And other assessments, perhaps equally dark, though less narrow, less rigid, and less implicitly despairing or utopian. 

Take that

A world map of atheism.

Acid test

If this is not confirmed before a week is over I will never even look at Breitbart again.

Captured-IS-Laptop-Contains-Bubonic-Plague-Recipes-WMD-Information

Fathers and Sons

For some, the greatest horror of adolescence is the growing realization that adults are just so totally full of shit.

 

It only starts with the idiotic hallucinations of religion and morality and extends well beyond both into a shocking plethora of beliefs about human nature, the inanimate world, and just about anything else you care to name that are abysmally, transparently stupid.

 

Not to mention that so much of all that is just a mess of bullying hogwash in aid of coercive control, and often downright dangerous to yourself.

 

Add all that to the shattering trials of puberty and there's no wonder at all that the young are profoundly alienated and many of them depressed to the point of suicide.

 

Could that be why so many young people find shockingly stupid ideologies attractive if only they justify smashing the adult world in which they were raised?

 

Yevgeny Vassilyich Bazarov.

 

Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky.

 

Sergey Nechayev.

 

Douglas MacArthur McCain.

 

I suppose the most telling thing is that no one has ever suggested this is a forgery.

 

The Revolutionary Catechism

 

As can be seen by googling, "nihilism" is a word with many meanings.

 

And there is this.

 

Nihilism

 

Just to be clear, the Russians were better off with the Czars, and the devils who killed Alexander II and others of their tribe teed up Russia for disaster at the hands of the Bolsheviks, or others like them, and about whom we can truthfully say that Russia and the world would have been vastly better off had they been drowned as infants.

A question that worries me more than it does him, I'll bet

Has Hillary Ever Been Right?

But since I have no suicidal impulse to die of hunger, cold, or disease in my declining years because of Republican attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and other helpful benefits I must admit I would prefer her victory to that of any eventual Republican, Rand Paul or not, in November of 2016.

You Republicans want me on your side?

Not going to happen while you pose a markedly greater threat to me and all those like me than Hillary, even with any dangers her uberhawk policies might provoke thrown into the mix.

Fix that; then we'll talk.

As for the piece by Pat Buchanan, he's dead on.

Well, it would be nice.

Blacks Must Confront Reality

Putin very unlikely to back away from this

"New Russia"

If you ask me, not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

Analogy limps.

UK terror threat level raised: Jihadist attack now 'highly likely'

When volunteers who fought for communism or anarchism under the inherently false flag of that dead man walking, the Spanish 2nd Republic, returned upon Franco's victory they posed no serious threat of violence to their homelands.

The case is quite otherwise with these folks.

Of course, dealing with this threat does not require any military action against ISIS in Iraq or elsewhere.

Just sound policy regarding re-entry to the US (do we have to allow it?) and good national security and police work.

US is NOT at war with ISIS. At this time.

White House: US not at war with ISIS

"Before getting into the strategy, though, there seems [to be] a fundamental, existential question: Is the United States presently at war with ISIS — yes or no?" MSNBC host Chris Hayes asked President Barack Obama's top spokesman, White House press secretary Josh Earnest, on Thursday.

Actually, that is a reading comprehension question and not an existential question.

ISIS is not al-Qaeda, is not an ally of al-Qaeda, and played no role in the 9/11 attacks.

So ISIS is not covered by any current congressional authorization for the use of force - what we have these days instead of declarations of war.

And that is why O the other day said that if, while considering what needs to be done, he and his advisers think significant force is required he will ask congress for such authorization.

As for whatever ISIS may say or do, nothing they say or do can waive the requirement for such an authorization, though of course ISIS may subject itself to the independent power of the president to use force short of war in other ways, as he has already done to (as he said) prevent genocide and protect US lives and interests in Iraq.

On the radio, this morning, the tone I noted in the voices over the ether was one of disappointment in reporting that the US and NATO have ruled out military action against Russia.

For a journalist, nothing is as much fun as a really good war.

A deadly liberal mistake?

Ebola Africa travel bans to be axed

Is this a job for people for whom humaneness, decency, and morality are replacements for religion?

O, this afternoon

Asked about possible US military intervention and direct military conflict with Russia, O said there will be no military solution to the problem of Russian conduct in Ukraine.

The most reassuring thing he said.

The most alarming?

The Baltic States are NATO states and the US will honor its Article Five obligations to them.

Too late to save the UK?

Restore the Stuarts.

Sexual jihad

Women volunteer for sexual jihad with Islamic State

They are volunteering to be "comfort women."

"Volunteer comfort women," eh?

Also known as "groupies."

Or, in DC, as "interns."

A liberal mayor of NYC gives criminals a break. Again. What else is new?

Fun City, all over again

I was quite young when John Lindsay was elected, but I will never forget he decided to let the little people express themselves in public spaces by allowing so called "graffiti-artists" to do their thing.

Police made no effort to stop them, and the city stopped trying to paint over or erase their damage.

The city subway looked as hellish as you would expect, inside an out, both the cars and the stations.

Anyway, so far as could be seen in news photos.

And the whole city suffered worse crime.

Talk about the opposite of "zero tolerance."

That was Hizzoner.

In case you hadn't noticed. (But how could you have missed it?)

Another Ferguson? Wait, wrong race, no interest.

Everybody in the world knows the way media deal with race in America is pure bullshit.

As is the way liberals deal with race.

It is impossible for an honest observer to miss.

The price of PC

Rotherham

Anyone care to compare media handling of this to their handling of that home for unwed mothers in Ireland?

Or the various scandals of Catholic priests basically getting a pass for this sort of thing?

She's annoying, yes. But she could be right. Which, I suppose, is even more annoying.

Would it kill you to hire more black cops? (Yes)

Ann Coulter.

And is that really what happened in the mortgage crisis?

I ask because she has a habit of telling even the most absurd and egregious lies.

In an age of instant recalls over bent mirrors, is this regulatory overkill?

Self driving cars and regulatory cramps

True enough, right wingers and whiz-bangers think any regulation is too much and we ought to trust our lives unreservedly to the first 20 something hot shit who says he knows more about anything than anyone working for the government.

And this could be just more of that.

But maybe not.

I would love a car I didn't actually have to drive.

In fact, rush hour driving is such a hassle it's likely the best argument for taking the bus.

Which is not to deny for a moment that there are insuperable arguments against it.

Arguments that certainly do not apply to a self-driving car.

Almost all alone, out there. Rand Paul against mucking around with ISIS.

How U.S. Interventionists Abetted the Rise of ISIS

In WSJ.

After attacking Hillary and John Kerry by name and side-swiping O, he writes in part,

"If American interests are at stake," I said in September, "then it is incumbent upon those advocating for military action to convince Congress and the American people of that threat. Too often, the debate begins and ends with an assertion that our national interest is at stake without any evidence of that assertion. The burden of proof lies with those who wish to engage in war."

Those wanting a U.S. war in Syria could not clearly show a U.S. national interest then, and they have been proven foolish now. A more realistic foreign policy would recognize that there are evil people and tyrannical regimes in this world, but also that America cannot police or solve every problem across the globe. Only after recognizing the practical limits of our foreign policy can we pursue policies that are in the best interest of the U.S.

The Islamic State represents a threat that should be taken seriously. But we should also recall how recent foreign-policy decisions have helped these extremists so that we don't make the same mistake of potentially aiding our enemies again.

God, I wish a Democrat sounded like that.

Did O really say that?

Merkel re American power

Merkel is mistaken if she thinks it was different in the past. 

The US was never able to solve all the worlds problems.

On the other hand, did O really say this only yesterday?

The United States is and will remain the one indispensable nation in the world...

My God, what arrogant claptrap from a man who should be ashamed of such nonsense.

The sky is falling

The right this morning indulges in screaming headlines of a Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Get past the headline and it's just that some rebel leader allegedly now confirms 3 to 4 thousand Russians have been fighting on the rebel side since the fighting began.

Not clear if that means all at once or in rotation, or if it means there are that many fighting with the rebels right now.

Anyway, so what?

Drudge is positively screaming about this.

Phooey.

Continuing alarm as it continues to spread

Ebola cases in west Africa could rise to 20,000 says WHO

The usual left wingers are reacting with entirely unsurprising moral outrage.

Blah, blah.

At some point it will occur to someone that nipping this sort of thing in the bud, in Africa or wherever it happens, is a very good investment for peoples and countries all around the world, provided they can afford it.

Much cheaper to stop a plague early in Africa or wherever than to combat the much bigger mess things would be by the time the outbreak reaches one's own homeland.

It's much too small a world, nowadays, to think of things like this as only somebody else's problem.

All schools in Nigeria closed

Nigeria closes schools over Ebola

This time, will it overrun all of Africa?

Do you think anyone can quarantine a continent?

Lately, the media and even medical professionals have referred to quarantine as "medieval," and cast doubts on its efficacy that are really doubts anyone is up to the task.

That is all just propaganda against its use and will be followed by denunciations of it for racism.

But it was de rigueur in America and elsewhere as recently as the 20th Century.

Perfect sense

Not for the first time, Pat Buchanan makes perfect sense on a question of foreign policy, on which neither party and neither political movement believes a word he says.

I don't even understand why right wing venues still publish him.

Buchanan, ISIS.

Pabst. Milwaukee, 1844.

2 years before the Mexican War.

16 years before the Civil War.

German beer in Milwaukee.

Ebola still getting worse, still spreading

Ebola reaches Congo

Also, the ghouls emerge.

Snake oil and "dietary supplements"

US still playing a leading role in its own economic suicide

US leads global capitalism

Oh, well.

The rich get richer and the rest of us get the shaft.

Why?

This is Johnny Walker Lindh, the accidental Taliban still languishing in prison.

Nobody at any time thought they needed to torture him for information.

This was just gratuitous cruelty to rival Nazis.

This is him.

The pic is from Wikipedia.

Ballsy.

Notorious Obama aide demanding end to fundraising efforts

True lovers of democracy, liberty, and free speech, are they?

Also due process, apparently.

Is recycling still bogus?

Some years back I heard tell that my town's trash recycling efforts were bogus since nobody was recycling the recyclables, the process being too expensive.

In consequence, all the sorting was so much wasted effort for the townspeople and the separate collections were wasted expense for the town government.

But liberals put those procedures in place and wanted to keep them there essentially for the propaganda impact, conditioning public beliefs and attitudes in what, for them, seemed politically advantageous ways.

Is that still the scoop?

ISIS members are not nihilists; the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards.

After communism, ultra-violence

Despite what the media and the American president have said and no doubt will repeatedly say, it just isn’t so.

[And neither Islam nor narco-terrorism is an "alternative to capitalism," of course.]

Still, though the analogy is far from perfect, Islam has replaced left wing revolution as the cause of some of our more profoundly alienated youth.

Unlike anarchism and Marxism, Islam is not a rationalization or expression of hatred of capitalism, and it is just silly to say that.

But it has become, especially through the halfway house of Black Muslim ideology, a rationalization and expression of the hatred felt so fiercely by so many black American youth for white America.

And for some recent Muslim immigrants to America and Europe, as well as a relative handful of white kids from Christian or non-religious families, it has become a rationalization and expression of hatred for the Occident.

But that does not in all cases mean the participants are moved by religious fervor or even, necessarily, by any degree of specifically religious sentiment.

Not every Russian patriotically engaged in The Second World War or the subsequent Cold War was moved by Communist fervor.

And not every Muslim moved to oppose what he perceives to be a war against Muslims by Christians is moved by actual religious fervor, any more than Catholics of the IRA or Protestants of the UDL were.

Tribal loyalty is different from religious motivation, though religion may partially define the tribe.

But all the same, the magnetic attraction of ISIS for some alienated youth of the Occident reminds one of the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War under the false flag of republicanism but in truth for the sake of secular utopian hallucinations.

[For those who might have missed it, the Spanish Republic of 1931 was dead when the Nationalist forces stepped ashore from Morocco in 1936, and had been born as an unstable regime supported almost exclusively by its enemies.]

Another point of imperfect analogy, just as Christians have characterized Islam as a Christian heresy, they and others before and during the Cold War so characterized both Marxism and anarchism.

But the terms can be changed, and we can see also an imperfect analogy between on the one side the pair of reforming and revolutionary Marxism and on the other the pair of pacific or moderate and revolutionary Islam.

And that leads to another parallel between the Cold War and the current struggle with Islam.

During the Cold War, the consensus was that the enemy of the Occident was not socialism or even Marxism in general, but specifically revolutionary Marxism, aka Leninism, Communism, Maoism, and so on.

And both GW and O have done everything they can to establish a consensus that today’s enemy of the Occident is not Islam but Jihader, terrorist Islam.

And just as, during the Cold War, non-revolutionary Marxists and socialists sometimes found themselves torn between East and West, today non-revolutionary Muslims are torn, sometimes opposing their own allies and allying themselves with their enemies.

You are not the enemy because you think someday Islam will dominate the world or the proletarian revolution will finally end history and the exploitation of man by man, or even because you long for that day.

You are the enemy because you take up arms, sincerely or not, to make it happen.

PS.

Yes, by the way, I am saying that, retrospectively, it would have made more sense to fight for Franco than the zombie 2nd Republic (though best, of course, would have been to flee the country, if possible without too great loss), and that generally right wing dictatorships from the interwar years through the end of the Cold War were much preferable to left wing ones, basing this solely on the measure of harm done to their own countries.

But even if we count all harm done, in general, against them I think Mao and Stalin still beat out Hitler, don't they?

And Hitler, both overall and purely domestically, was very far from typical of dictators of the right, probably being among them the grand champion of slaughter.

Of course, if he had defeated Stalin, just the harm he is believed to have intended for "slavdom" might have set a record even the worst reds would never beat. 

PPS.

Yes, I know,  there is a current of propaganda on the right that insists Fascism and even Nazism are ideologies of the left.

But it depends on the ridiculous and baseless claim that only fiscal conservatives and libertarians count as right wing, leaving totally out of account numerous Christian monarchs and such loyal supporters as Otto von Bismarck. 

And the distinguishing trait of Hitlerism, its genocidal anti-Semitism and bloody minded anti-slavism, are not even on the left-right continuum.

Razzzzzberry.

And who can blame him?

As he has grown weary of Washington, Barack Obama has shed parts of his presidency, like drying petals falling off a rose.

He has a dream

But Maureen thinks O should have gone to Ferguson and played the roles he left to the Attorney General and Al Sharpton.

He has "outsourced race," she says, critically and with dismay.

Liberals are such idiots.

Who could blame him for not wanting to go there?

If he appears to damn the rioters and looters black people will be even more put off, and many will shower him with epithets like "Tom" and "Oreo."

If he appears to damn the cops and white people in general (he could get away with that in the relative obscurity of a few campaign books) as Sharpton and Holder do he will further entrench white resentments, damaging the remainder of his presidency and the interests of black people and the rest of us, too.

He cannot play a winning hand or a healing role.

Liberals say the latter is what they want but they are lying.

The want him to damn America, just like Jeremiah Wright, but more elegantly.

Or they absurdly mistake their man, having completely blotted O's twenty years at the feet of his guru, Rev. Wright, from their minds.

Same problem, different fixes

Dem Senator Calls For Boycott Of Burger King, Tells Consumers To Eat At Wendy’s

Republicans demand we lower corporate taxes.

Or we could revise the laws to prevent this.

Stuck in 1968. Or, It's Different Without a Draft.

Did anybody tell him there hasn't been a draft since Nixon?

Dan Rather To Hawkish Pundits: Send Your Kids To War Or 'Don't Even Talk To Me'

Sending voluntary professionals to fight a war is like sending voluntary professionals to fight a forest fire.

Send your kids to fight brush fires in California or don't even talk to me about sending anyone?

I agree we don't need another war.

But who we send is not the problem.

Ferguson

Why does everybody believe Brown is the guy in that blurry video from the store?

Because the police say they think it's him?

Anything else?

The anorexic look is out

My wife will be pleased

Oh, my.

Spend billions to save them. No sacrifice is too great.

World's rarest bird needs new home

Hillary the hawk.

SEN. RAND PAUL CALLS HILLARY CLINTON A 'WAR HAWK'

No way he'll be the GOP nominee, but anyway she has plenty of practice with hardball against those less hawkish than she.

She ran against O that way in the primaries of 2008.

If RP were the GOP nominee some Republicans would defect to Hillary over Israel and the whole military globalism thing.

Some Democrats would defect to RP, and he would surely get a big piece of the independent vote that otherwise sympathizes with the Democrats.

Pundits from time to time repeat the saw that in the generals nobody cares about foreign policy, but that has been dead wrong since 9/11 caused among voters a huge wave of fear of being killed by terrorists right here in America that has been diminishing over time since then.

Kerry was not hawkish enough to beat GW in 2004 and McCain was too hawkish to beat O in 2008 - not to mention that he was downright incoherent on the market collapse.

Of course, another attack on the scale of 9/11 and Americans will plunge right back into mortal terror.

Remember what happened in Boston?

Well, then.

Holder is O's replacement for Jeremiah Wright

Racism forever

In 2008 I thought O's presidency could help overcome our racial divisions by undermining black America's fantastic vision of itself as crushed and kept down by a hostile white America.

But almost the entire left and some on the right have seized upon his presidency as an extended opportunity to reinforce that delusion.

And that includes people in and around the White House, including the president himself, Eric Holder, and others both black and white.

Partly owing to this it seems increasingly probable to me that the browner the country gets the worse and more undermining will be our racial divisions and the more irreversible and painful the declining position of American whites.

America's white elites have repeatedly bought temporary social peace from American blacks with concessions at the expense of non-elite whites, ever since the later years of the civil rights era.

That trend will continue and worsen.

Others footing the bill will be Asians and in lesser measure other non-whites and American Jews.

Costs will be measured in tax money, property destruction, and bloodshed, as they have been over the decades, as well as the increasing economic drag of a growing, useless and harmful underclass whose miseries will only strengthen their hatred of everyone else.

Costs to whites overseas will be measured in the indirect effects of costs to American whites, and also in the adverse impact of declining American power and solidarity with the Occident.

Things will get worse even in my lifetime.

I do not believe anyone can stop this.

Or, rather, those who could stop it most certainly won't.

Didn't I warn you?

Environmentalists are ignoring poor countries' needs

This is an article urging that American energy policy be skewed, at America's cost, to the benefit of the world's poor and, in particular, the poor of India.

It is by Amartya Sen.

This is what happens when foreigners and immigrants have the power to determine American policy or a place at the table in deciding it.

It is not American interests that are uppermost in their hearts.

The respect he enjoys among American elites, and particularly liberal American elites, says much about them and their attitudes about the hoi polloi.

Ebola: Seems like old times, though the CDC is not quite ready to publicly admit it. But it's close.

Police Quarantine, Open Fire On Liberian Neighborhood Over Ebola Crisis

Says the article, in pertinent part.

Quarantines of this nature have not been imposed for close to a century. 

The Centers of Disease Control believes the method can be effective, but implores authorities to use it humanely, allowing food, water, and medical care to be able to enter the areas in question.

“It might work,” Centers for Disease Control quarantine expert Dr. Martin S. Cetron said to the New York Times. 

“But it has a lot of potential to go poorly if it’s not done with an ethical approach. 

"Just letting the disease burn out and considering that the price of controlling it — we don’t live in that era anymore.”

Actually, we do, in Africa and anywhere else the locals cannot or will not cooperate with more modern, less Draconian methods.

I am thinking this is going to get worse.

The disease will continue to spread.

Eventually, the grim necessity and cruel consequences of such methods - there will be plenty of violence, destruction, and "collateral damage" as we go along - will be blamed on the West and especially on America.

The race card has already been played several times during this outbreak at liberal net venues, and it will get much worse.

Specific topics have so far included use of experimental drugs in very short supply for white Ebola victims but not others - the short supplies themselves being blamed on capitalist medicine and profit-driven drug R&D - and the slow and inadequate response of America to the outbreak, both of them already repeatedly condemned as racist.

That will be how the left bludgeons us toward massive transfers of wealth in aid of a sort of limited socialized medicine for Africa, financed almost exclusively by the Occident, with increasingly frequent and hysterical denunciations of racism eventually reaching endorsements of anti-white and anti-Western violence in North America, Europe, and Africa.

No blame will attach to liberals for so far persistently denouncing publicity for and expressions of alarm about this outbreak as right wing, racist, and alarmist propaganda.

If I recall correctly, Germany lost half its population to the Black Plague.

How much of Africa's population will be lost to this epidemic?

And whose fault will that be?

"Hey, hey, ho, ho; Western Civ has got to go!"

Boots on the ground in Iraq? War in Syria?

Will it be war?

O may seek an unconstitutional in letter though not in spirit congressional authorization for the use of force to go at ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Greg Dworkin reports the public is opposed.

I have seen no polls.

Is he just making that up?

According to the right, the public demands action and revenge for James Foley.

When they claim to be "reality-based," don't snicker.

When someone quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan, don't cry.

O does not want to allow ISIS a safe haven from American attack - though not from the forces of Assad - in Syria.

But he does not want to be seen as allying with or relying on Assad, nor does he seem quite yet ready to admit, even to himself, that Assad is the best we can hope for in Syria.

Dworkin does not agree.

Essay question

Twitter beat cable to #Ferguson, but cable quickly followed, led by MSNBC

Liberals award plaudits for quicker and more coverage of Ferguson.

Why?

More time on Ebola and less on both Ferguson and ISIS would have pleased me more.

Is the game worth the candle?

Not to me.

Radical shifts needed to combat IS.

Fine.

Let them be someone else's radical shifts.

A couple beers and BBC is hilarious

Well, I suppose it's just that PC is hilarious.

Manning 'denied gender treatment'

The US military has yet to offer Pte First Class Chelsea Manning sex change treatment despite medical recommendations, her lawyer has said.

Crazy voters make for crazy laws.

Poll: Most Americans Want to Criminalize Pre-Teens Playing Unsupervised

Go watch "To Kill a Mockingbird" again.

Note the kids play unsupervised in a time and place when and where guns were common as dirt, and all adults who happened to be handy were expected to intervene in a supervisory capacity if need be.

Today they might be arrested.

And then the parents would be arrested for letting their kids out, unaccompanied.

Any movie made before 2000 could show kids alone or in swarms playing out of doors, unsupervised.

Ever read Tom Sawyer?

Huckleberry Finn?

I think it started with the special kid seats people are nowadays required to strap their children into.

I was raised in the era of bench seats, and rode in the front seat on my Mom's lap.

Nobody got arrested or even ticketed.

PS, not just the voters are crazy.

Aurora Theater Should Have Predicted Mass Shooting, Judge Rules

Because that sort of thing happens, said the judge.

Drudge, irresponsible media, Republican jackasses, fabricate specific threat to American city

Threat to Chicago

Inhofe warns of attack

They don't care what kind of bilge they spew, so long as it hurts O and drags the country toward another whopping, unnecessary war.

Every right wing war-puppy on the net or with any sort of media megaphone is demanding war, urging terror, and denouncing O for utter cluelessness.

They really, really, really want to get back into the game in Iraq.

Lessons

People who want to make history are the worst thing about history.

Don't expect this will work

Liberia seals off slum of 50,000 people

Imagine the residents of Ferguson asked to display the social discipline needed to contain an outbreak.

That's about how well things are going in Liberia.

Anyway, it won't be long before this becomes another inspiration for massive and perhaps global outbursts of hatred for white people that our media and leftists will furiously encourage, blaming the related carnage entirely on people who have nothing to do with it.

Actually a pretty stupid remark

Hollande on ISIS

The article quotes him thus.

He also said that the international community bore a “heavy responsibility” for what is happening in Syria, with its knock-on effects in Iraq.

“If, two years ago, we had acted to ensure a transition, we wouldn’t have had ISIS,” he said.

“If, one year ago, the major powers had reacted to the use of chemical weapons, we wouldn’t have had this terrible choice between a dictator and a terrorist group,” adding that the rebels “deserve all our support,” he added.

Bosh.

A year ago they should have agreed with Russia to leave Assad alone.

Not as bad as the Khmer Rouge, these guys are pretty awful and their much more expansive ambitions make them more dangerous to their neighbors, to Europe, and (though at quite a remove) to America than the KR ever were.

Organized efforts to cope with ISIS would be welcome, I think.

But no further significant American military involvement should be needed or would be desirable.

Not our turn, this week.

Germany on world-cop duty, maybe?

Thanks for the help, CNN

A typical black household has accumulated less than one-tenth of the wealth of a typical white one.

CNN says "the figures are staggering."

Not a single suggestion as to why.

Holder doing good work, too

Holder to announce record Bank of America settlement

No jail terms, but big, big settlements for the runaway banks.

Now, if only we could cut them down to size, just as Bernie Sanders keeps urging.

Holder dealing with his personal demons, not the case at hand

Eric H. Holder Jr., in Ferguson, shares painful memories of racism

Has he ever in his life sympathetically asked a white victim of a black on white hate crime about his painful memories?

Asked white kids bullied by black gangs in schools, or their parents?

Asked white people in general who barely have anything to do with black people, tired of the endless hate and blame directed at them by screaming mobs of black people, encouraged by white idiots every bit as lunatic as the student radicals of the 1960's who sincerely wanted and honestly believed they were making a red revolution in America?

I would guess not.

A lot of people who are not black have ugly memories to deal with, too.

But Holder will be chumming with the likes of Al Sharpton and the spiritual brethren of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.

Sometimes Ann Coulter is actually right.

No facts, no peace

Holder

Street Theater in Ferguson

Feeding Frenzy

Ferguson

KURTZ: SOME LIBERAL OUTLETS CREATING 'ALMOST A LYNCH MOB MENTALITY' IN FERGUSON

Reparations for Ferguson

FERGUSON UPDATE: 31 ARRESTS, TWO SHOOTINGS, POLICE COME UNDER ‘HEAVY GUNFIRE’

Reparations?

Sure, send a bill for all this to the rioters of Ferguson.

Jesus.

Meanwhile, the cop version of what actually happened is getting more and more support from witnesses and evidence.

Lesson number one is that black people hate white people.

Lesson number two is that some black people will seize anything that looks remotely like an opportunity to loot and vandalize.

Lesson number three is that dedicated liberals always blame the cops and always scream hatred for whites whenever possible, urging on venomous outbreaks of racial hatred of whites with ridiculous denunciations of white people for hating blacks.

After that come lessons about policing that have been urged since all this began by conservatives sites like NRO and leading opinion makers like Mark Steyn.

Update: Maybe the first lesson is the utter uselessness of the entire US classe politique.

Sexual competition

If men felt compelled to wear codpieces, what were women looking for in men?

The new conservatism vs. the Fuzz

Mark Steyn on Ferguson and cops

From the piece.

The most basic problem is that we will never know for certain what happened. 

Why? 

Because the Ferguson cruiser did not have a camera recording the incident. 

That's simply not credible. 

"Law" "enforcement" in Ferguson apparently has at its disposal tear gas, riot gear, armored vehicles and machine guns . . . but not a dashcam. 

That's ridiculous. 

I remember a few years ago when my one-man police department in New Hampshire purchased a camera for its cruiser. 

It's about as cheap and basic a police expense as there is.

Last year, my meek mild-mannered mumsy office manager was pulled over by an angry small-town cop in breach of her Fourth Amendment rights. 

This is the one.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Not sure how that would apply to just pulling somebody over for a traffic stop, but anyway . . .

Is Steyn a fan of the incorporation doctrine, as many libertarians today are?

Or does he think, perhaps rightly, that as written the scope of this amendment is not limited to the federal government and never was.

Of the first ten amendments, only the first from its very wording applies only to the federal government.

Nothing in the texts of the others, the seventh perhaps excepted, even hints they only apply to the federal government.

Incorporation is historically redundant, on that reading, except as regards the first.

Anyway, back to Steyn.

The state lost in court because the officer's artful narrative and the usual faked-up-after-the-fact incident report did not match the dashcam footage. 

Three years ago, I was pulled over by an unmarked vehicle in Vermont and (to put it mildly) erroneously ticketed. 

In court, I was withering about the department's policy of no dashcams for unmarked cars, and traffic cops driving around pretending to be James Bond but without the super-secret spy camera. 

The judge loathed me (as judges tend to), but I won that case. 

In 2014, when a police cruiser doesn't have a camera, it's a conscious choice. 

And it should be regarded as such.

And, if we have to have federal subsidy programs for municipal police departments, we should scrap the one that gives them the second-hand military hardware from Tikrit and Kandahar and replace it with one that ensures every patrol car has a camera.

Read past that to the international statistics on police violence.

We're number one, all right.

Steyn is devastating, his only error being he seems to think there was ever a time when American cops didn't think exactly this way.

Take away their guns and leave them only their nightsticks.

Make American police learn their jobs from scratch from European departments.

"The privilege don't exist!"

Maureen Dowd

Justice is right on this one.

So was Wilford Brimley in Absence of Malice.

Odd piece for a conservative paper

A black president couldn’t stop the Ferguson race riots

Very odd.

If not, why not? Bernie Sanders for Democratic nominee in '16

Why Won't the Left Get Behind Bernie Sanders '16?

I would actually want him to beat her, of course.

This talk of a primary challenge from the left influencing how she would govern is a fantasy, and influencing how she would run without influencing how she would govern only means making her run in disguise, pretending to be less the corporate would-be War Lord than she really is.

But Sanders is white, male, and not even a Democrat, though he caucuses with them.

Too bad.

Chicago '68

Think Progress on Ferguson

Not since Chicago have I seen such an orgy of liberal cop-bashing, nicely blended with relentless race baiting.

I doubt any one thing did more than that spectacle to alienate ordinary white people from the liberals and the Democratic Party, in all those years.

Really bad advice from Michael Eric Dyson

Dyson is a racist jerk with a phony degree.

Every time O moves out of the role of America's president and into the role of race leader he harms his presidency and the country, adding to the years that will likely pass before we see another black president.

Al Sharpton says "We're not looters, we're liberators!"

Meanwhile, Al S consolidates his new-found respectability.

I repeat that it seems to me, so far, that Brown was a thug who had just robbed a store a short time before somehow getting into an altercation with police that apparently ended with an enraged cop shooting him to death.

Shot six times, not in the back but in the front, not from right close up but from further away, if I have this right.

It is not impossible to imagine scenarios in which it's an injured, disabled, or just physically less capable cop firing in self defense at a charging attacker.

It's also possible and from the look of things more likely the cop was just furious and fired out of rage.

If at first you don't succeed

Holder orders third autopsy

Keep trying a man until finally you get a guilty verdict.

Keep having plebiscites on the same issue until the people vote the way you want.

What this entire disaster shows more than anything is that the bulk of the black people of America refuse to trust or be governed by white officials, after decades of encouragement in that attitude by white liberal race baiters.

That and that American cops are out of control.

We knew both these things.

25% of young black men are felons. And their families love them.

That actually explains all of this.

It may yet turn out the cop shot a fleeing robber.

Still excessive force and maybe murder.

Governor criticises riot town police

They intended to blow it up?

US-Kurdish bid to retake Mosul dam

Erasure of the past

Machiavelli on Livy.

That changes in Sects and Tongues, and the happening of Floods and Pestilences, obliterate the Memory of the Past

In this chapter, M, an Italian in an age when Christians, and especially Italians, still smarted from the final obliteration of Byzantium, exaggerates the sins of Christianity against the past and ignores the much more recent and dreadful sins of Islam.

Why?

Btw, I am surprised at how much pure superstition and magical thinking M reveals.

Abusive indictment

Perry is guilty only of hardball politics. 

He broke no law and did nothing he was not lawfully and constitutionally entitled to do.

But his purpose was blatantly partisan.

But isn't that true of nearly everything politicians do?

US grand jury indicts Texas governor

How many Germans are to die, this time, for the Ukraine?

How many Brits or Danes?

How many Dutch or Italians?

Not one American, I sincerely hope.

Ukraine rebel: Russian arms on way

"Convert or die!"

It is an interesting question how many chose conversion and how many died.

Not to mention the tens, if not hundreds, of millions who did neither, Buddhists and Hindus and other victims of Muslim conquest extending across all of South and Southeast Asia.

Is honest history impossible?

An honest history would be a recitation of repeated outbursts of savagery by this genocidal cult, Islam, extending right up to the present.

Crackpots

SeaWorld to redesign its whale tank

"Convert or die." The world gets a refresher course in Muslim tolerance.

Those are the alternatives Islam historically allows those it considers "devil worshippers" and "heathen," all unbelievers who are not "people of The Book."

This, the essential violence of "The Religion of Peace," its major failures in India and Southeast Asia of course did not permanently moderate.

Today, the world press calls it "genocide," though BBC, no doubt with an eye over its shoulder at the nearby British Muslim bearing a frown and a scimitar, is loathe this morning to call this slaughter of Yazidis a massacre without shudder-quotes.

Islam was born in Arabia with exactly this violence toward the paganism its first mission was to expunge, sired by the Charles Manson of monotheist madmen, Mohammed.

Yazidi villagers 'massacred' in Iraq

And the next time Geert Wilders compares The Koran to Mein Kampf and Islam to Nazism it will be harder to rush the real inconvenient truth of our time off the stage with catcalls of "racism!" and "Islamophobia!"

Meanwhile, the US needs some time off from the hard work of policing the world.

Let somebody else be indispensable, for a while.

Yankee, come home.

On jurisprudence, from liberal Ian Millhiser

Why You Can’t Trust The Judiciary

A big whine about what judges really do.

 [I]f motivated reasoning drives judges and justices to place their partisan views above the law, at least in highly politically charged cases, then the case for giving these judges the power to decide these cases breaks down. 

The Constitution empowers the judiciary because we trust judges to do something more than vote their political preferences. 

If they are unable to set aside their partisan preferences whenever the subject of Obamacare comes up, then we are better off leaving those decisions to people who are actually accountable to the electorate.

If this is directed at the right it is mammoth hypocrisy from the party of the Warren Court.

If it is sincere Millhiser is a child just discovering Santa Claus doesn't really exist.

And the next time some equal protection baloney comes up having to do with race or gays he'll be sounding like a good liberal, again.

Some portions of his article that provoke a question.

“[W]here Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce,” Scalia wrote in 2005, “it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

. . . . . 

In the early Twentieth Century, conservative justices embraced various legal doctrines that held many progressive laws seeking to improve labor conditions unconstitutional. 

Mostly that was all about state laws and substantive due process, q.v.

Liberals responded to these extra-constitutional legal doctrines by arguing that the courts should get out of the business of censoring economic legislation — and they won. 

As regards both state and federal legislative power.

In 1938, the Supreme Court held that “regulatory legislation affecting ordinary commercial transactions is not to be pronounced unconstitutional” unless it is unsupported by any “rational basis within the knowledge and experience of the legislators.”

It is on this basis that the authority of congress to ban marijuana or any other drug, altogether, is conceded.

And whence else the authority of the FDA over food or to control the commerce in and use of medicines?

Whence the authority for the whole regime of drugs only by prescription and only after federally controlled testing?

If those views of the constitutionality, not the desirability, of the congressional power to "regulate commerce" are right, why couldn't the Congress of 1860, or any earlier Congress after 1808, simply ban slavery?

Congress right now bans ownership of a wide variety of kinds of animals and constitutionally could, if it doesn't, demand liberation in the wild.

Or rather, such seems to be the conventional view.

But if that view is right, since nothing in the Civil War amendments has any hint of bearing on the extent of the congressional power to regulate commerce, then . . . . ?

In so many ways it is so obvious we have a national government, now, supplemented but only vestigially limited by the power of the states.

A government not as thoroughly national as Hamilton wanted, but definitely not the much looser federation created by the constitution of Philadelphia, a document not significantly modified in that regard by the Civil War amendments that did not give congress or anyone else the power to ban slavery or anything else, but merely banned it outright.

And the following is a distinction without a difference, isn't it?

The standard defense offered when judges divide along partisan lines is that they are voting their “judicial philosophies” rather than voting their politics. 

Republican Justice Antonin Scalia offered this defense of himself and his colleagues in an interview shortly after his Court upheld the bulk of the Affordable Care Act. 

“I don’t think any of my colleagues, on any cases, vote the way they do for political reasons,” Scalia claimed. 

Rather, “[t]hey vote the way they do because they have their — their own — their own judicial philosophy. And they may have been selected by the Democrats because they have . . . that particular philosophy or they may have been selected by the Republicans because they have that particular judicial philosophy.” 

Randy Barnett, a libertarian law professor and one of the lawyers who unsuccessfully challenged Obamacare before the Supreme Court, made a similar argument on Twitter in response to the Washington Times analysis of health care decisions.

Do many people really want the Supremes and their inferior courts to modify the constitution on their own, quite at will?

I don't recall who, but a liberal writer of the "Living Constitution" school did say approvingly, once upon a time, that the Supreme Court is in substance a constitutional convention in permanent session; and many echoed him, that claim being liberal conventional wisdom, for a time.

If so, the constitution itself does not make it so by express or implied grant of power, nor even charge the Supremes with policing the constitutionality of state or federal acts of any kind.

And most people, in principle, don't want it so; it's a little too undemocratic.

But in practice it's about whose ox gets gored, as when every liberal in the country yelled that our rights don't depend on majority votes, a propaganda line urged in support of courts lying that bans on homosexuality or gay marriage were unconstitutional.

On the other hand, does any sane person want the pre-Civil War, pre-New Deal government back?

They know not what they ask for, they who ask for that.

It is nearly impossible to believe that more than a few complete crackpots among them really understand what that would mean.

A Gendankenexperiment.

What if the constitution, in addition to Article V, had expressly authorized the Supremes to modify the constitution, in the expectation they would do so sparingly and only if pressed, when the Article V process seemed not to avail.

Before the Civil War that would have put slavery at risk, and there is no way it could have been accepted.

And now, after the Civil War, the clash with the exaggerated and mostly hypocritical national ideology of democracy would not allow us to accept an amendment explicitly authorizing such power.

But those men of the 18th Century might have bought it, had it not been for slavery.

Even today, some conservatives publicly not much enamored of democracy, anyway, might accept it, privately and in principle, though publicly they could not since the actual exercise of that power has since the start of the 20th Century run so strongly against their agenda in so many ways.

Interesting thought.

After all, we have a republic, not a democracy.

And have we not accepted that de facto the Supremes have such power, provided they exercise it through lies and proceed with some restraint?

Update. 

In the face of liberal enormities one might ask what would be acting without restraint.

Abolishing the Senate, perhaps, or replacing the states with prefectures.

Who are the racists?

Missouri Police Captain Meets With Protesters In Ferguson

So what they needed was a big, black authority figure in charge.

Now everything will be fine.

Can't trust those pale-ass bastards.

Rep. Steve King: Ferguson Protestors Are Of A Single 'Continental Origin'

Yes, he was a bit antsy about saying they were pretty much all black people.

I know little about King and what I know I don't much like, but blaming him for taking note of the obvious and daring to say it, albeit in an obviously intimidated way, is just weird.

The siege is broken

Obama s'engage à poursuivre les frappes aériennes

The air strikes will go on.

He looks quite aged by the job.

But we are all eight years older.

The Kurds are the good Muslims

They are looking for sympathy for their nationalist project, along with aid.

Taking the right side of this crisis got them arms, money, air support, and some new friends.

'The culture, not the religion'

Liberals thus divert blame for the horrific violence of Islam from Islam to the male-dominated culture of Islamic lands.

Recall that for the left it is unacceptable to blame Islam for anything, though it is always acceptable to blame men for anything.

And Christianity, of course.

Anyway, in the present case, does that mean we should blame the despotism of the Chinese state not on Communism or Marxism, but on Chinese culture?

Oops.

Somehow that seems an even greater offense to PC.

Tough call, though.

Jail 'destroyed' China rights lawyer

Vastly underestimated

Ebola crisis 'vastly underestimated'

Not by me, I think.

Nanny is sitting on your e-cigarettes

Regulatory overkill?

And shouldn't taxation on e-cigarettes be considerably less than on tobacco products, to keep the price down as a further encouragement to smokers unable to kick nicotine to switch away from real smoking?

When there is no smoke there is no second hand smoke.

So why ban e-cigarettes at bars, restaurants, hospitals, workplaces, etc?

Nanny doing the wrong thing

Tax e-cigarettes?

Ferguson is the tip of the iceberg. But we all knew that.

Seven Reasons Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal

A young conservative crisply summarizes the problem and recommends proven steps toward remediation, one of which is to require that the on-duty behavior of all police be at all times officially and publicly video-monitored and recorded.

None of which is to say rioting, looting, or vandalism are at all justified or to be tolerated.

Of which, however, there has apparently been very little in Ferguson, so far.

It is interesting that conservatives, in the past knee-jerk supporters of police in all controversies about excessive force or about the policing of demonstrations, are among the most forthright in denouncing the fuzz on this occasion, both specifically the police making such a mess of things in Ferguson and the general refusal of police organizations to make any serious effort to punish, contain, and roll back spreading police brutality and violence.

The rising influence of libertarians or, anyway, libertarian views?

Kevin Williams at NRO

Many liberals have raised the point that while Ferguson is mostly black the police there are overwhelmingly white.

I am curious, myself, how that happened but do not agree that we should require that the police "look like the policed," any more than the medical profession, greengrocers, or car salesmen need to look like their customer populations.

Or legislators.

Demilitarization of federal agencies

Dershowitz at Newsmax

World Net Daily on militarized cops

Not allowed?

What is it with people and suicide in this allegedly post Christian age?

People always call enemy soldiers cowards, though that is egregiously stupid.

Bill Maher got fired for pointing out the 9/11 terrorists were certainly not cowards.

And now this?

Robin Williams' daughter quits Twitter

Fuck off, assholes.

Media pouring gasoline on the flames, as usual, as liberal sites complain they aren't doing it enough

How The Outrage Over The Michael Brown Shooting Is Going Viral

Just thrilling.

Maybe there will be rioting all over the country and all the cities will burn.

Won't that be fun?

There is a reason why even quasi-monopolies are regulated

COMCAST bills for free service calls

Ron Fournier of the Obama-hating war party is losing sleep for love of country and dread of ISIS

What if we get hit again with a 9/11-sized attack?

Well, then everyone would know for sure that more than a decade of war, more than a trillion dollars down the rat hole, and hundreds of thousands of dead (nearly a million, now?) did not prevent it.

Vastly, immeasurably disproportionate expense, destruction, and bloodshed way beyond sensible and effective retaliation for 9/11 were all loss and no gain, exactly as now appears so obvious and exactly as the opponents of GW's two stupid wars warned.

But the justly infamous military-industrial complex cleaned up.

Had we proceeded in measured fashion all these years with them attacking and us responding in due proportion the fighting would still be going on, just as it is now.

But the cost to us and innocent Muslims would have been far less, the damage to Muslim lands and anti-radical states far less, and the gains by the most violent Islamists, thriving as they do on destruction and chaos, would have been far less.

Talk about a "dirty war."

I would guess the Algerians were equally bloodthirsty putting down the FIS, back in the day.

Egypt: Rab’a Killings Likely Crimes against Humanity

And if this leads the US government to distance itself from Egypt or even start telling the world al-Sisi has to go, as it told the world Assad has to go, that would be yet another gross stupidity of American policy driven mostly by leftist globalism.

I can hear Hillary, now, crowing about how we have to be a global force for good.

Why, a Shining City on a Hill, for all the world to admire, be dazzled by, and imitate, . . . and obey.

What "crime against humanity" would that be, by the way?

A violation of what law, enforceable in what duly established and lawful court?

Talk of impeachment a Democratic campaign ploy?

Numerous Republicans have said so, only to be belied by repeated shouts from their own peanut gallery, "Impeach him! Impeach him!"

That would be in the Congress, of course.

But, hey, it isn't a bad tactic to use to get out the black vote, normally very sluggish in mid-terms.

And other Democrats who, if more sluggish than Republicans as they normally are, will take a severe beating in November.

Top Democrat Predicts Obama Will Be Impeached If GOP Keeps The House

He might even be right.

Good to go, said the mullahs.

Ebola Drug Supply Is Exhausted After Doses Sent to Africa

Lindsey Graham needs an enema

Is ISIS an 'existential threat'?

Came then this warning from Sen. Graham:

“If he [Obama] does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you want to call these guys, they’re coming here. This is not just about Baghdad, not just about Syria. It is about our homeland.”

“I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorists’ ability to operate in Syria and Iraq,” said Graham, “Mr. President … what is your strategy to stop these people from attacking the homeland?”

An ‘existential threat’?

Well, at its most literal and complete, think Greece vs Troy or Rome vs Carthage.

When the Greeks were done, Troy was gone.

When the Romans were done, anyway as the story is told, Carthage was gone.

In both cases, the government, the city, and the people were all gone.

Is Hamas an existential threat to Israel?

Well, if Hamas successfully carried out their war against Israel, would they eliminate not only the Israeli state but all its people, or anyway its Jewish people, not necessarily killing them all but anyway forcing them out (the Greeks didn’t kill every Trojan), perhaps replacing Israel with some judenrein Arab/Muslin Palestinian state?

So, at any rate, they seem to claim.

Is anybody an existential threat to the US?

Well, anybody with enough nukes, I suppose, and some way to deliver them.

But that’s a lot of nukes.

Probably the Russians, the Brits, and the French could come up with enough of them.

Maybe the Chinese.

The Israeli’s? Maybe not.

Muslim terrorists? ISIS? Not at all.

Besides, what makes someone an existential threat is not only the ability but the will.

Nobody with the ability really seems to have the will.

Might ISIS somehow lay hands on some sort of WMD and deliver it to US territory?

Or somebody harbored by ISIS?

Well, I suppose.

But the same could be said for not only numerous Muslim groups but many, many nations, a good many of them not our friends.

You want to scare yourself out of sleeping, you can.

But do we need to do anything about ISIS?

Well, within reason, we should assist with international efforts against terrorism.

Do we need to take military action in Iraq or Syria?

No.

Now go read Pat Buchanan.

He makes a hell of a lot more sense than Lindsey Graham.

Stop Hillary

Hillary's Delicate, Dangerous Game

I don't know if anyone can.

But I hope so.

Someone who would govern from at least as far to her left as O, but further, if possible, someone more economically progressive, less Zionist, and less interventionist.

There's a lot of space to O's left on the spectrum that's still part of what Michael Harrington used to call "the democratic left," progressive but still less socialist than capitalist and very far from Leninist, hard-left territory.

I'm not sure that that's Pocahontas; I hear she's actually quite Hawkish, compared to O, though to Hillary's left on economic progressivism.

Shredding the state

Anonymous To Ferguson Police: Expect Us

The cartels in Colombia bought leftist and popular support by building hospitals.

Then they nearly destroyed, even replaced the state.

Mexico today is in deep trouble.

Bootlegging gangs and the Mafia never went quite that far in America, so far as I know.

The left shamelessly cheers crime, just as it shamelessly cheers criminals in black robes who lie about the constitution.

The right does it, too.

But the left is much more successful and has gone much further in pretty radically shaping American society with their lies.

They did it

Problems on the horizon for future city budgets

How come?

Even more white people will leave.

FERGUSON ERUPTS!

The FBI has already jumped in.

A Trayvon Martin attorney has been hired.

Big losers in Florida, as I recall, both of them.

Explaining Ferguson riots

As close as we will ever get to a Fox conservative saying the Bush invasion was a terrible mistake

Laura Ingraham: ‘Iraq Is Worse Off’ Now Than Under Saddam

OMG, she's OLD and FAT

Bill and Hillary at the beach

Drudge featured a couple of prominent links to this spread.

Malice will be served, and it will help undermine youthful support.

Another lesson in why the primary system was really not a good idea

Something is rotten in Anne Arundel County, Maryland

80% of life is just showing up.

And that's why loons win primaries and put crackpot candidates in place who do not represent the mainstream of the relevant party's membership, the party's office holders, or the party "establishment."

The primary system does not represent democracy.

It does not empower the generality of party members or (in case of open primaries) of local voters.

It empowers creeps and fanatics.

Defending it as more democratic than the previous system of nomination mostly by party officials and office holders is a lie.

It is equally undemocratic and has more pernicious results, the growing extremism of the Republican Party being the most sinister example.

The morning after

Hillary the Hawk

So far, every liberal blogger I've read has tried to paint her hawkish stands as pandering to those hated white working class voters of Appalachia, the Great Lakes, and the Rockies.

Pshaw.

This is the real Hillary, and deflecting blame for this from her onto a favorite liberal target is just denial and pre-election baloney to mitigate the hostility of Obama fans and anti-interventionists.

Anti-interventionism for the Democrats is sucker-bait.

Update, later that same day.

Conservatives are thrilled to use Hillary to back up their attacks on Obama for wussy incompetence, much as they were in 2008.

That publicity might be good for her among conservatives who prioritize hawkishness in the general of 2016, but it's undermining O's last couple of years and will hurt her in the primaries, provided anybody plausible wants to run as an un-hawk.

For sure, nobody will run as a dove.

O might have been the most dovish Democrat among the presidentiables.

And he's done, now.

And anybody with the last name "Paul" has less chance of getting the GOP nomination than Rachel Maddow.

The message of the news: Let's have more war!

Politicians in America and Britain today are checking in with calls for more air strikes and a deeper military engagement against ISIS.

As if no one had learned from everything that's happened so far that all you get when you join in with others making a mess is a bigger mess.

In the US, the usual Republican suspects (McCain and his buddies) are demanding more, more.

And the media are screaming with alarm that the emergence of ISIS is already a disaster and any further success for it would be just unspeakably terrible for America, just unspeakably.

Something must be done, something must be done, war is something, war must be done.

And guess who has to do it.

Update, later that same day.

And the polls?

When O wanted to attack Assad in Syria the public yelled in protest and the Congress refused to support him.

Now?

The lesson of subjectivity

If you are a brain in a vat, does that matter?

Neo had a chance to destroy the Matrix and did not.

He just made human life within it more fun for lovers of comic book heroes with superhuman powers.

Of course, experience could be more deceptive even than that.

Berkeley.

Solipsism.

Hume.

The Skeptics, said Voltaire, are not a sect of philosophers but a sect of liars.

Voltaire, like Moore, was unable to accept that the world of our experience is certainly a lie, certainly a merely virtual world.

Or that our belief that it connects to, perhaps represents, an objective, somehow material, real world including other minds - minds of others, at least humans, with whom we are of a kind and communicate - is mere animal faith.

An animal faith for which, at its most uncorrupted, the ray of vision reaches out from our eyes and sees the objects that comprise the world where they are and, generally, as they are.

And among them are other people whose perception of the physical, objective world we all inhabit is as direct and veridical as our own.

But Hume himself provided the answer before the comics.

We can know our faith for what it is.

It is possible to disbelieve its every article and yet jump into life with all the practical, "as if" faith of the faithless Neo, who knows it's all illusion.

Though the suggestion would certainly freak out those most dogmatic of  physicalists and pig-headed of philistines, the enlightened, atheist liberals of America, for undermining morals and weakening resistance to Christianity.