The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Monday, June 30, 2014

Without question, a solid bourgeois and a firm republican

Phoebe vs. Hepzibah.
 
Compare Hawthorne on Patrician vs. Plebian with the rather less assertively modern French Lieutenant's Woman of John Fowles on Aristocracy vs. Bourgeoisie.
 
The House of the Seven Gables.
 
Fowles is notably more open to the aristocratic liberty of those who are free from toil because, being rich, they live by the toil of others.
 
Or at least more superficially understanding.
 
Hawthorne is out of sympathy even with the coupon-clippers, those bourgeois aristos of the capitalist age who live on the labor of others as surely as any Duke or Earl.
 
An attitude equally forthright in Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn and elsewhere.
 
In The Scarlet Letter, we saw in the introductory "The Customs House" his contempt for government employees whose charges were essentially sinecures.

"If there is hope it lies in the proles."

Very funny.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

The Black Man

So, in this novel, the hags of Salem really do meet at midnight in the forest to celebrate their evil doings and their arrangements with The Black Man.
 
Well, why not?
 
The Scarlet Letter.
 
Everyone thinks her husband is dead.
 
Why was the charge adultery rather than fornication?

The animals sick of the plague

La Fontaine 7/1.

The consolations of faith.

Human sacrifice.

The justice of the strong.

Ebola outbreak worsens

'Drastic action' needed on Ebola

What is "drastic action"?

What is a "stronger international response"?

Effectively quarantine so vast an area? 

Physically impossible.

Nuke that entire corner of Africa?

Psychologically and politically impossible.

An infected UN medico gets on a plane to Geneva and that's it, we have a real pandemic killing 60 to 90% of mankind.

Who's quoting odds?

BBC favors the state and its clients

Increased protection for war wrecks

Or you could call it just another world government power grab in favor of officially sponsored experts, academics, and institutions.

Private salvagers are looters, says BBC.

Auschwitz death toll revised, again

Auschwitz: la vérité

Not 6 million.

Not 5.5 million, as the Russians said in 1945.

Not even the 1.2 million claimed by Raul Hilberg.

8 hundred thousand people were killed at Auschwitz, about 630,000 of them Jews killed in the gas chambers.

Yes, there were gas chambers.

And unprecedented crematoria for rapid and complete incineration of thousands a day.

Holy cow!

A ridiculous, anti-libertarian waste of a lot of money.

Golden Gate Bridge to get suicide net

$76 million.

Friday, June 27, 2014

The husband betrayed

From the 16th Century to our own, he is a joke unless vengeful, and then he is a demon.
 
In The Scarlet Letter, he is a demon and the man who put horns on him is a flawed but basically admirable fellow.
 
Such is the enlightened literature of adultery.

8 million American Muslims?


That’s enough, thanks.

BG’s tirade, quite justified and sensible, was a heck of a thing to drop on that one poor girl who hardly deserved to be the object of all that.

25% of the world’s Muslims are supporters of radicalism?

Wow.

(Where did that number come from?)

Dana Milbank's instantly famous take on the Heritage incident

America is eighty some percent Christian, I think, but I doubt 25% of them support anything remotely like the maximum agenda (repeal of the entire sexual revolution) of the Christian right, and I doubt even 1% support violence to achieve that end.

Christianity at its most conservative is not so bloody as Islam, either in its ends or in its means.

Would it be allowed if they wanted it?


Suppose Wilders’ party won and attempted to carry out this agenda.

What are the odds the EU or NATO would simply occupy the country and put a stop to it?

Or at least go nuts with all sorts of threats and pressure, much worse than Europe and America have done regarding Russia and the Ukraine?

McWorld vs. Jihad

The imperialism of true believers is in command.



What liberal interventionism is all about.

Democracy?

Well, the highly restrained pseudo-democracy typical of the modern world?

Sure.

But feminism, gay rights, and the sexual revolution, too.

McWorld on the assault, the excuse – and the inevitable blowback result – being Jihad.

Ethnic cleansing the West doesn’t mind, at all


NATO and encirclement.

How, exactly, is this good for the US?

Japan rising


As Japan steps up America will step down.

Someday.

Maybe.

Why ask why?

Why do people congregate at intersections and in narrows, where they cannot fail to obstruct traffic?

The grass is greener

The more I read the pundits, the more I think I should read the news instead.

The more I read the news, the more I think I should read People or EW instead.

I could always stop reading and take a nap.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Pearl

Well, she's a little affliction, a little demon sent to harass and immiserate Hester, is she not?

What the hell?

The Scarlet Letter.

Unutterable

US demands Russian action on Ukraine

Words cannot express the stupidity of this meddling.

The reality is that interventionist policies put America and American interests at risk that would otherwise be much safer.

Interventionism endangers America.

O's very own, very stupid war

Obama seeks $500m for Syria rebels

The idiocy of it all is just unspeakable.

Worse than debacle. Fiasco.

Maliki: Russian jets will turn tide

Unbelievable.

All those years of war, all those trillions, and the country becomes a Russian client?

O, walk away.

Just walk away.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

He was wonderful in his time

Eli Wallach dies

He was splendid in Lord Jim, too.

He played villains with great verve, good humor, and tremendous spirit.

Contrast him with Curt Jurgens who often brilliantly played a cowardly villain.

Wallach played a fearless villain.

Again, think of Lord Jim.

They were both born in 1915.

Jurgens died in 1982. 

A little overdone?

Her husband is old, past it, missing for years, thought dead, and a hunchback.

And a vengeful bastard and a truly poor loser, at that.

Was Hawthorne afraid we'd otherwise have little sympathy for his inwardly defiant, scornful, and remorseless "heroine"?

Was this the first "enlightened" book in America written in defense of adultery?

Yes, yes.

A defense of the sinner is not a defense of the sin.

Sure.

Divorce. Adultery. Fornication. Homosexuality.

In enlightened literature, the sinner is only a stalking horse for the sin.

The Scarlet Letter, 1850.

She's a better man than Dimmesdale, that's for sure.

It's the oddest thing

US court backs mobile phone privacy

Liberals today on liberal XM claimed that "of course" the NSA doesn't need a warrant to seize and examine everything and anything on your phone, openly or secretly, for reasons of national security no court will ever question.

Or even suspect.

Why?

"Actor" and "actress" are OK, but not "waiter" and "waitress," "steward" and "stewardess," "author" and "authoress," still less "aviator" and "aviatrix."

The PC arbitrators are, well, deliberately arbitrarily, to keep us wrong-footed at all times, exhausted, beaten, and at their mercy.

Even truth is no defense.

Gary Oldman found that out.

In America, there are truths the mere utterance of which can ruin your career.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

A Jack Bauer moment

On the most recent episode of 24 the writers gave us the first, unmistakable Jack Bauer moment of the season.

The wife and I did not at all see that coming, but when it happened it was so perfectly in character we laughed and I applauded, "Yes! You go Jack!"

Anyone familiar with previous seasons knows exactly what I am talking about.

More than made up for the wuss move, merely faking the death of the president.

Buchanan to Obama: Stay out of Iraq and Syria!

Make Congress Vote On It

Quotha,

Rand Paul is right. 

If Barack Obama wants to take us into a new war, with air attacks and drone strikes, or with ground troops, he has a constitutional duty to get Congress to authorize that war.

And if Congress does authorize a new war, at least the voters will know whom to be rid of this November.

Dems on inequality, today

Hillary: "Obviously Blessed"

Massive inequality is fine if you make your tax returns public and lay claim to rather startlingly arbitrary divine favor as the basis and, let's face it, moral justification of it all.

Who can quarrel with the blatant and horrific unfairness of life, the profound injustice of not just nature but culture, if it all goes back to the will of God?

And is that the line you expect liberals to take on these topics?

Well, guess again.

Monday, June 23, 2014

This is "hitting back"?

Dick Cheney on Rand Paul

Per the story,

On ABC's "This Week," Jonathan Karl asked Cheney to respond to an op-ed Paul wrote for the Wall Street Journal, in which he criticized the former Vice President.
 
"I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq, I'm a strong supporter now. Everybody knows what my position is," Cheney said.
 
"But if we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we're going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.
 
"Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist.
 
"He doesn't believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world."

Yes, he's pretty much that.

And his view is more popular than Cheney's, right now.

Hillary, another Romney

Are you sure she doesn't think of the lower orders as a gaggle of moochers whose votes are bought by Democratic redistribution?

Not "Truly well off"

Sure sounds like Romney, on this whole wealth thing.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Kerry mends fences

US unlocks military aid to Egypt

Wait until the Patent Office hears those helicopters are called "Apaches."

Let us give thanks

Within the last few years, the war party has insisted O go all in in Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Iran, and now Iraq.

O has refused.

What would Romney have done?

Or Hillary?

And McCain was the war party.

Liberals, libertarians, diversity, multiculturalism, federalism, and states' rights

So, they'd be OK with establishment of Buddhism and vegetarianism in Hawaii, Mormonism and polygamy in Utah, and Catholicism (no divorce, no abortion, no contraception, no porn, and prison for gays) in Massachusetts?

Bare-knuckle capitalism in Texas (no public schools, no vouchers, and no regulation of education) and communism in Rhode Island (political correctness triumphant in education and everything else)?

Plebiscitary democracy in California with universal suffrage at twelve  - foreigners, illegals, prisoners, and sea-mammals included - while in Georgia the governor and senate are life-tenured and only landowning males above forty can vote?

Japanese the official language of Hawaii and Spanish of Arizona?

No known political faction in America would stand for any of this.

Nearly everything they claim to stand for is baloney.

Hell, most politically committed Americans can't stand the idea of that much real diversity on the planet, let alone in our own country.

Normative political and social theory is a subdivision of normative ethics.

Of morality, in other words.

And it is every bit as absolute and universalist.

And every bit as committed to coercion, and universal coercion at that.

The mullahs want to subjugate the world to Allah.

The neocons want to conquer the world for "democratic capitalism."

The feminists want to make the whole world defer to women's rights, and the liberals want to make the whole world secularist, anti-racist, anti-nationalist, and gay friendly.

And religion?

They're all equal and must never contradict natural science or the moral authority of the left gurus of political correctness, anywhere in the world.

And perhaps the remaining reds still wait with longing for a world revolution to destroy capitalism and at last save all mankind.

On the other hand, ordinarily, atheist, amoralist egoists could not care less about you and your doings if you lived on a planet circling Alpha Centauri a thousand years ago rather than right now, right next door.

In fact, they might rather prefer that of you and all but a select few fellow humans, if the advantages of civilization over the life of a mountain man were not so telling.

Oh, all right.

I exaggerate.

Off the reservation?

Turley is usually quoted by liberal journos in favor of their side of some conflict.

Not this time.

The patent office overreach

Not that many sincerely give a damn, but the patent office was wrong to do this.

And he's right on the broader issue, too.

Sterilization of prisoners in California

The right to a family?

Another highly questionable liberal invention.

If they are really serious about such a right can the states be permitted legal agencies and processes to remove children from their dreadful parents?

Do the liberal morality mullahs intend to insist upon or at least permit such things but not involuntary sterilization? 

I cannot believe they intend to stop the state saving helpless kids in peril. 

But then why is that all right but the other not?

Because Hitler did the other?

Pshaw. 

In their propaganda, sure. 

But not in liberal heads. 

They aren't as numbingly stupid as their propaganda. 

No one ever is. 

Sterilizations in California

Looks like doctors do have a way of taking this sort of decision into their own hands, doesn't it?

Do you still want Hillary?

Remember liberals and feminists defending Bill in the Monica affair, even to the point of defending his perjury, for which he was later disbarred, in a related legal case?

They would absolutely have destroyed any Republican guilty of such conduct and their behavior in defense of Bill Clinton, "the nation's first black president," was so contemptible that those who lived through it will be scarred by the memory to their dying days.

Next up, Hillary.

Hillary's people

She is not even the nominee and she does not have to be.

But they are rising to her defense in this matter, and that is too disgusting for words.

By the way, didn't Nuremberg put an end to that "just doing my job" defense, once and for all?

There are jobs it is disgraceful to take, such as death camp guard, torturer, or maybe lawyer.

And what does it tell you about the profession and the entire legal system if what she did to that girl falls under "giving her client the best possible defense"?

She apparently lied to the court and the jury about the girl's sexual history and habits.

A 12 year old girl who got raped by a grown man.

Hm.

Given what we know of their "professional ethics," who can be surprised that lawyers are the font et origo of the open sewer of lies about the constitution that runs right down the center of American politics and government?

These people take great pride in what they do.

They really think a lot of themselves.

Anyway, read MC's story.

He is right on the money about the story, about what it says about Hillary, what it says about lawyers, and the significance of the spike.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

"How I spent my summer vacation"

Le djihad 3.0 des Français partis en Syrie

Social media and Jihad.

Cultural relativism

China struggles with dog-meat dilemma

Do I recall reading that pigs are actually considerably smarter than dogs?

And make decent pets?

Counterrevolution and culture war

Egypt confirms mass death sentences

Hundreds?

Oh, there will be more than hundreds, if they are serious about breaking the Brotherhood and crushing Islamism in Egypt for a generation.

Well, radical Islamism.

As it seems they are.

I think Machiavelli says somewhere that if you have to hurt someone enough to make him hate you then you'd better kill him.

Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries know this well, if only by their fear, and act accordingly.

And, of course, if he already hates you  .  .  .  .

Things can always get worse

Show of force raises Iraq tensions

And you thought the government was Shiite.

In Europe in the age of the Crusades bishops were sometimes warlords, huge men, mounted and in armor, hung about with swords and battle-axes.

Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mehdi Army, though not quite so colorful, is every bit as medieval a figure.

This is the true face of the lands of Islam, lands of furious warrior Imams, blood-soaked Ayatollahs, and slaughtering holy men with their harems of 9 year olds, not all of them girls.

Armed and bristling with the best technology they could buy, these savage throwbacks, with the vast wealth the West has given them for the oil beneath the sands they happen to walk upon.

Their retarded and terrifying culture with its psychopathic religion is a menace to the world only because the West has made it so.

Thank decades of enlightened struggle to set Caliban free, make him rich and powerful, and turn him loose, the same malignant monster he was to begin with.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Les Flâneurs

Some there are who cannot live without purpose, a goal, an aim, an overarching objective to which their whole lives are devoted, be it holiness, Jihad, the Revolution, science, or the greatest good of the greatest number.

A reason to live (a widely recognized, if not approved, reason to live?) that lends unity and meaning to all they do.

Even if only the most single-minded pursuit of self-interest, fame, wealth, power, or pleasure.

But then there are those who take life as they find it, the flâneurs of existence who pursue now one thing, now another, what needs doing at the time or seems interesting for the moment, with no unifying project, whose lives have no theme.

We live without purpose and die without meaning.

A life according to nature.

The majority of mankind are not existential flaneurs.

They are too conventional for that.

Rand Paul goes it alone, just like his Dad did

US out of Iraq - Rand Paul

Fox, the WSJ, and maybe the entire Murdoch neocon noise machine are clamoring for action.

Sean Hannity reportedly tore RP up in a Fox interview, the other night.

He will likely not get the nomination, but he certainly deserves credit for sticking to his guns.

And he's right on this, of course, the eyewash about Reagan and Cap Weinberger aside.

He's right to oppose further involvement in Iraq and right to demand O go back to congress before re-committing the US to war there.

That is to say, I approve most heartily.

Glad someone is telling the American people the best thing for the US to do is stay the hell out of this.

Well, he's not quite alone.

There's Pat Buchanan, driven off the air for racism by people who were not his audience, anyway.

And still a voice for sanity on questions of war.

And some of the usual hippies, of course, whom no one listens to.

I'm partial to Rachel M, myself.

The virus spreads

The PC virus.

Redskins and the Patent Office

Talk about a completely bogus issue, this is one.

The scoop on Dick and the executive personality

The Dickster

Maha:

Back in 2006 I wrote a post called “Save Us From CEOs” which is more or less about the phenomenon of high-level executives and politicians who are pathologically incapable of perceiving their own failures.

Dick and his pal Shrub are featured prominently, and I think it holds up pretty well.

The problem is that, as a species, we seem always to allow the self-confident, assertive types to be in charge whether they actually know what they’re doing, or not.

I don’t think this is a new thing (see, for example, the Civil War and General George B. McClellan).

The Dickster is such a perfect example of such a specimen that for a time “Dick Cheney” became a kind of euphemism for “arrogant clueless empty suit.”

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Damn!


That’s how we got sucked into Vietnam, in the first place.

Kennedy sent advisers.

Then Johnson - against his own better judgment, he later said - went all the way.

Hell of a thing to do against your own better judgment!

And yet here we have O . . . 

Dogs, humans, and moral training

Dogs feel guilt without having moral beliefs, either in the impossible sense (ho, ho) or in the possible sense.

(For that distinction see the earliest posts labeled “amoralism.”)

Humans can do the same, though in our society, broadly speaking, only moral skeptics lack moral beliefs in both senses.

Dogs and other trainable animals respond usefully to coercion, intimidation, bribery, violence, displays of affection, shaming, ridicule, contempt, and the whole carrot and stick thing.

Humans included.

Moral skeptics included.

Hence amoralists included.

As a general rule, anyway.

Liberals decide who conservatives can read in their local papers


St Louis Post-Dispatch.

Whose policy was that, anyhow?


In the season’s 3rd episode, a murder occurs to avenge a decades-old act of involuntary sterilization.

The episode advises viewers that in the 1970’s white doctors on Indian reservations sterilized some women, some quite young and childless, without their knowledge.

The episode makes it seem it was entirely at the doctors’ own discretion.

But really?

Is that true history?

Yes, it’s contagious. The sectarian rage virus, I mean.


Decades of the Muslims' bad global example have inspired leaders of previously pacific religions to campaigns of violence and hate.

Hindus in India.

And now Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Thailand.

The role of the shit disturbers

When I was in grad school a Canadian friend from Toronto used to refer contemptuously to political activists, left or right, as “shit disturbers.”

A brilliant young fellow, possibly a genius, he carved out a name for himself in his chosen field before finishing his master’s.

Decades later, given the spectacle of the harm done to the world by people who sought meaning for their lives through social change, I am ever more tempted to share that view.

But social changers are not always true believers driven by gratuitous ideologies, secular or religious.

Nor are they all driven by ambition, hate, or a taste for power and cruelty, as so many of the most notable revolutionary leaders, left and right, of the last century were, and so many other social changers of our own time are.

Sometimes they are the very opposite of that, true unbelievers seizing a chance to put an end to the power of others much more deserving of the titles “true believer.”

And the best example of that sort of thing is the work of the federal and Supreme Court justices who, over the long stretch of the 20th Century reaching into the 21st, freed us from the power of clericalism and took the power of government at all levels out of the hands of hate-driven, malevolent racism in America.

All of that was based on lies about the constitution and required extraordinary usurpation of power by black-robed revolutionaries.

But it was the best thing done by anybody the words “political activists” might even remotely be thought to refer to in all those years in our country.

Comparable progressive advances over those same years in other areas, while of great value, were by no means of such vast social significance, touching all our lives as intimately as can be imagined.

It was a huge revolution of freedom, it freed us all from an enormous weight of clericalism and the hate-driven abuse of state power that was the regime of Jim Crow and segregation.

And it was resisted at every step, and is resisted and deplored even now, by conservatives whose central claim in all their propaganda is that they stand for liberty, but whose continued aim is to put everything back where it was, just as far as they can.

Well, as regards clericalism, anyway. 

Update.

All the same, this would be an STD disaster for the whole human race.

Talk about a fine breeding ground for ever more horrific diseases.

And the liberals have from the first overstepped by forcing the anti-racist and anticlericalist agendas on private entities, including their contemporary feminist and gay militant codicils.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Pat Buchanan tells it like it is

Their war, not ours

Quotha, giving John McCain the lie,

[N]othing that happens in Mesopotamia is going to threaten the existence of the United States.

Got it?

On the other hand, the more we whack the hornets' nest . . . .

A republic, not a democracy

The war party is positively screaming all over TV that O absolutely must defy public opinion to "do the right thing" and LEAP back into the Iraq quagmire.

Even Democrats are yelling what America MUST do.

And Dick Cheney, chicken-hawk neocon in chief, is denouncing Obama to everyone who will listen as a hopeless disaster of a president for not strictly adhering to neocon policy advice throughout his term.

PS.

On a pro-war article on the net to which I posted the comment that if we just got out of the region and let chips fall where they may the dominoes would never reach us, as they did not when Cambodia and Vietnam fell, a conservative replied that 9/11 was a domino.

Not, it was not.

A terrorist attack is not a domino.

A domino would be yet another country fallen to crackpot Islam.

Whether the risk of terrorist attacks on the US would be greater if people like ISIS took over a country or two, or even a large region or two, is an unanswerable question.

But three trillion dollars have been pissed away so far, along with hundreds of thousands of lives, thousands of them Americans, on that baseless supposition.

And, really, even if all that has diminished the risk, has it diminished it enough to justify the costs?

Could it diminish the risk enough for such vast costs?

Frankly, I think it has increased the risk by creating a burning, deathless hatred of America in hundreds of thousands, even millions, of victims either of American violence or of violence they blame on America.

And as for the ever-present argument from the Bomb, I am aware of absolutely no reason to believe all that war has diminished such risk at all.

And Americans would be absolute nincompoops to just take the neocons' or even our government's word for it.

And apparently Americans are not falling for it.

Too bad that ultimately it doesn't matter.

Conservatives are like liberals.

Exactly as they love the constitution, they love democracy only when the democracy is on their side.

Otherwise they are delighted we are not a democracy but a republic whose officials can ignore the popular will.

Or they just lie, about the constitution or about the popular will.

Monday, June 16, 2014

True Believers

 
No doubt liberals will blame white colonialism for dooming Africa with unsuitable boundaries, as they have decided to blame Sykes-Picot for the rising waves of Jihad in the Middle East.
 
All boundaries were and have been made by war.
 
There are no natural boundaries.

Africa, the Middle East, and all known regions of the world have been plagued by war and conquest for as far into the past as anyone can see.
 
And the left always finds a way to blame white people, stupid and hateful though that is.
 
But what I wanted to say was that today, when the Communist governments of China, Vietnam, and elsewhere no longer believe in Communism and red terrorists and guerrillas are giving up and coming in from the cold all over Latin America, the torch has been passed.
 
Today's global public enemy number one, today's mother of fanaticism, terrorism, war, and totalitarianism, is Islam.

Baghdad's ally and ours, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria

Syria pounds ISIL bases, coordinating with Baghdad

Better him than ISIL (ISIS).

Also, better him than us!

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Who writes the rules?

Liberals write the law for the sake of people who want to get a divorce.

Conservatives wrote it for the sake of people who didn't want to be divorced.

Profiting from slavery

Slave shrimp

Profit is made from X when total revenues from production and sale of X exceed total costs.

Nothing else is profit from X.

Thus only people in the trade, themselves, can profit from slavery, those who produce slaves as well as those who buy slaves in bulk for distribution and resale.

Before the whites put a stop to it, that would have been black Africans who captured untold millions of other black Africans for enslavement, for example, and the Arabs and other Muslim traders they sold to, and the Muslim, European, and American shippers they sold to, and the wholesalers they supplied in African and Middle Eastern lands, in India, and in the Americas, as well as retailers if any in those same areas.

Persons employing slaves in their enterprises do not profit from slavery or even the labor of the slaves they own, nor by any other factor of production, but certainly may diminish their costs by use of slaves as they might by use of any form of cheaper labor, or any cheaper factors of production.

And that, I think, covers it.

Do people or enterprises buying products made by slaves, or produced using components or materials or other factors of production made by slaves, or themselves using components or materials or other factors of production made by slaves, or etc. . . . profit from slavery?

Well, no, though they may indeed realize savings and it may even happen that they can only afford such products and cannot afford alternatives made only by free labor, produced using only components, materials, and other factors of production made only by free labor, themselves using only components, materials, and other factors of production made only by free labor, and etc. . . .  - even free labor more viciously sweated and worse compensated than the slaves.

If I recall correctly, there was a time in ante bellum America when it was pretty much impossible for ordinary folks to buy clothing, for example, not incorporating materials made by slaves, or etc. . . . and perhaps many other products as well.

Leaving out the really, really poor who wore only used clothing or found castoffs, of whom there were many.

The post as KOS to which I link threatens moral condemnation of white consumers buying shrimp from farms recently discovered by The Guardian to be using shrimp feed made from fish caught by boats using slave labor, and thus also indirectly future moral demands that their white descendants pay reparations to the Asian descendants of those slave fishermen to the billionth generation.

Hence these questions that might as well have been raised by recent demands of privileged black writers in America and their well-off white allies that another black skin privilege be created here, that of receiving reparations for slavery though they were never slaves, from white people who never owned slaves or lived in a society that legally allowed slavery, almost none of whose ancestors were in the trade and many of whose ancestors were not even Americans at the time.

These whites, of course, are very, very far from profiting from slavery, and it is equally far from evident that they or their non-American ancestors ever faced lower costs because of slavery.

As to those ancestors who were American at the time of slavery and may (it is uncertain) have faced lower costs on account of it, it is far from evident either that the cost difference was significant or that they had any actual alternative.

Anyway, as to the moral issues the proper and final response is that morality is coercive bunk by no means always in a laudable cause, as are the political demands purportedly resting on it.

And in this case both the moral condemnation and the demands resting on it are particularly revolting.

Given that those on whose behalf demands are made do not include descendants of non-slaves whose exploitation was equally awful or even worse this is transparently racist special pleasing.

Given that those upon whom demands are made include only white and leave out black descendants of those who actually did profit while including (again) only white descendants of multitudes who did not, this again is transparently racist special pleading.

In sum, the whole business stems from and powerfully encourages the racial hatred of American blacks for American whites.

That, along with the looting, is of course the point.

Anyway, to return to the matter at hand, people buying these shrimp don't profit from slavery though they may face lesser costs on its account.

As to that, just how important that cost difference is, by the time the shrimp get to the super market, is hard to say, though I must point out that despite the KOS writer shrimp at the local store are very far from cheap.

Should you avoid buying such shrimp on account of the involvement of slaves?

Should you stop buying anything at all because of such involvement, assuming you have the least idea of it?

Well, that's up to you, but your individual choice will have no noticeable effect - far more shrimp are simply lost along the way in a few days than you will ever buy in all your life.

Come to that, should you stop buying goods from Asia or wherever labor is, by comparison with America and Europe, much, much cheaper or cruelly exploited?

No more consumer electronics for you, eh?

And where will you buy your clothes?

And, again, you as a single consumer are as invisible and utterly insignificant as you as a voter.

And what can these questions about what you should do mean, anyway, if they are not meaningless moral questions laden with menace?

You may do as you wish, of course, but morality swept aside, why would something so completely out of your hands as the ultimate sources on the far side of the world of what you buy in any case concern you?

Just a thought.

Here is a little something about right and might.

The wolf does not always get to eat the lamb. 

But he tries. 

Jean de La Fontaine, The Wolf and the Lamb

Translation by Eli Siegel    

A lamb was quenching its thirst
In the water of a pure stream.
A fasting wolf came by, looking for something;
He was attracted by hunger to this place.
—What makes you so bold as to meddle with my drinking?
Said this animal, very angry.
You will be punished for your boldness.
—Sir, answered the lamb, let Your Majesty
Not put himself into a rage;
But rather, let him consider
That I am taking a drink of water
In the stream
More than twenty steps below him;
And that, consequently, in no way,
Am I troubling his supply.
—You do trouble it, answered the cruel beast.
And I know you said bad things of me last year.
—How could I do that when I wasn't born,
Answered the lamb; I am still at my mother's breast.
—If it wasn't you, then it was your brother.
—I haven't a brother.—It was then someone close to you;
For you have no sympathy for me,
You, your shepherds and your dogs.
I have been told of this.I have to make things even.
Saying this, into the woods
The wolf carries the lamb, and then eats him
Without any other why or wherefore.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

We've been here before

Rachel Maddow last night had a long segment comparing the US disaster in Iraq with that in Vietnam.

Perfectly legitimate and valid.

Excellent show, saddening and tragic.

About those European elections

Will

Like George Will, media comment in general on the rise of the EU-rejectionists conflates patriotism with political ethnic nationalism.

Let's clear this up a bit.

The world is full of sovereign states that are not nation-states in the generally accepted, biological / cultural / linguistic sense of that term.

Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and even the UK are among the most markedly non-national states in Europe.

India is among the most markedly non-national states outside Europe, and very few of the settler states left by European colonialism around the world are even close to being that.

Swiss patriotism is not Swiss nationalism since the Swiss people is not in the requisite sense a nation, and the same is true of the US, Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, and many other countries around the world.

And the same is true of the countries making up the EU, none of which is without some ethnic diversity and most of which are very far from the uniformity required by the 19th Century ideal.

Too, ethnic nationalism isn't even always political, being sometimes a sentiment or a loyalty similar to familial attachment, which rarely aspires to political sovereignty.

And political ethnic nationalism is itself a diverse thing, its aims being sometimes no more than acceptance of diversity within a non-national state, sometimes preservation of majority status within an ethnically diverse state, sometimes secession and creation of a separate state in which one's own ethnos can dominate, sometimes unification of separate states of the same ethnos into a single, encompassing national state, and notoriously sometimes conquest of neighboring peoples to reduce them to permanent servitude to one's own.

Contrast, for instance, the political aspirations of ethnic Russians for language rights as an accepted minority within some mostly non-Russian states that became independent with the breakup of the Soviet Union with the aspirations of those Germans and Austrians who together welcomed the Anschluss.

On the other hand, Will is right that nationalism is something different from racism and does not entail it.

It is perfectly possible for a Slovak nationalist to be in no sense a racist, either as regards positive sentiment, loyalty, or political aspiration regarding whites or negative sentiment or aspiration regarding those of other races.

And anyway racism, either positive or negative, can involve a variety of political aspirations or none at all, being again something similar to familial feeling.

As to the matter at hand, EU-rejectionism is overwhelmingly motivated by a mix of patriotism, nationalism, and racism, and not at all exclusively by the last or even the second.

Nigel Farage has been at pains to demonstrate that his party and its program are patriotic but not racist; and I believe its domestic politics are opposed to those of both Welsh and Scottish nationalists.

And that is at the root of his wish to remain distant from Marine Le Pen's Front National since the latter, as inherited from her irrepressible and inconvenient father, is heavily influenced by leaders and supporters whose politics are indeed a brew of patriotism combined with nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism - those last being a legacy, however, she seems to be trying to overcome.

All the same, the aims of his movement and hers largely coincide: withdrawing from the EU to restore national sovereignty and shutting off immigration for economic, but also nationalist and sometimes racist reasons, as well as reasons of national security and domestic tranquility.

All of this, of course, Will distorts, spinning popular rejection of the EU like mad into some sort of Thatcherite rebellion of free-market devotees, as have many others on the American right.

And here again the FN, with its frank protectionism and support for France's family-friendly welfare state and customary dirigisme, is an inconvenient reality.


Meanwhile, others of both left and right, for exactly contrary reasons, depict the anti-EU movement as motivated entirely by various forms of tribalism of which, say, Pat Buchanan approves and those who got him fired disapprove.

How does he keep his job?

Shep Smith on calls for renewed war

Not the first time I've asked.

Gerald Ford channels forward to John McCain

The day the senate said "no more war."

A reminder on Rachel's blog.

It's true, sort of; but so what?

Ever heard "religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people?"

For "religion" put "Christianity."

That's what people who say such things normally have in mind, isn't it?

Sure.

But now for "religion" put "communism."

Or "fascism."

Or "Nazism."

Beginning to have doubts?

And do such political versions of the warm-hearted, liberal remark about religion make the Nazi Party, the Iron Cross, the Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge, the Shining Path, and all the others less horrific enemies of the human race?

And now put "Islam" in place of "religion."

Well?

Friday, June 13, 2014

BBC World Service discovers fire

Interviews exposing the shocking rape culture of urban street gangs, the boys holding the girls in common, the girls forced into common sexual service, the Big Dogs sometimes setting one or more aside for their private use.

How does BBC think street gangs have always treated their groupies?

OK, they prettied it up in West Side Story.

So?

Welcome to the primal horde.

The thing about John McCain

If he'd had his way we'd still be in Vietnam.

Iran intervenes to save the Shiite dominated government in Iraq


A race for Baghdad.

Many think the region is coming apart.

The "Arab Spring" was blind and even willful wishful thinking of the kind that has deceived - self-deceived - all the idiotic democracy exporters in the country, of both parties, since the White House jackasses who worked for GW told us it would be a cake walk and the peoples of the region would greet our triumphal armies with parades and flowers, in overwhelming gratitude for liberation.

To the people who protested nothing of the kind would happen on this planet they replied America was so powerful we could "make our own reality."

Confident fatheads always rise to the top.

Alarmed nay-says always get pushed aside.

Humans are fucking idiots.

Update, subsequent reports say Iran has sent no forces and does not plan to send any.

Quit smoking, get fat

EU may define obesity as disability

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Debacle?



Apparently the most likely successors to Assad in Syria are even now threatening to plunge Iraq into chaos.

Sunnis more aggressive and radical than al-Qaeda.

Remember Bush pere intentionally refused the pleas of his neocon advisers to force out Saddam Hussein for fear of worse that would follow him.

Pleas his son, inheritor of those same advisers, would later accede to.

"Nobody could have foreseen . . . "

Oh?

I remember the fall of Saigon and the terrible sight of the helicopters carrying people from the roof of the US embassy and other last vestiges of safety to carriers offshore, only to be pushed into the sea once emptied to make room for more arriving behind them.

I remember the fall of Phnom Penh.

What's the endgame?

If Islam is the new global enemy number one in succession to Communism, what's the endgame?

How does the danger pass, or at least receed, as that of the red menace has?

Or maybe it doesn't?


Communism failed because whole countries woke up one morning, elites included, and realized they all knew it was bullshit.

That sort of public awakening has never happened from religion. 

Well, never yet. 

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Eric Cantor loses primary to anti-immigration challenger


The reigning view is that he lost because he wasn’t sufficiently firm in opposition to “amnesty” or any sort of path to legalization for illegals, not even the recent waves of unaccompanied kids.

Which, of course, has liberals shouting “Racism!” from the rooftops, accusing Brat, his voters, all who oppose the liberal position(s) on immigration, and the entire Republican Party.

Gleefully, in some cases, as they seem convinced this makes Hillary, or whatever eventual Democrat, a shoe-in for November of 2014.

It is the liberals, after all, who have decided that the Republican Party represents almost exclusively the white people of America, with whom they are at war.

Their electoral success with that message, I gather, depends in large part on their white supporters not taking it too seriously.

Much as their message of war on men – purely defensive, of course, and aimed only to save American women, and indeed all of us, from the bloody-minded Republican war on women – has not much penetrated the skulls of male Democratic voters.

Much as, according to liberals citing credible evidence, Republican voters regularly refuse to take seriously the radical views that the conservatives they vote for in fact do hold.

The truth is that the opposition to immigration, Republican and not, has two sources.

One is nationalist in the economic sense and goes back to the days when Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan campaigned furiously against free trade as exporting good American jobs and immigration as flooding the country with the cheapest available foreign labor to drive down American wages.

The other is nationalist in a partly cultural, party racial sense, based on fears that the racial and cultural balance of the population is being altered in a manner disadvantageous to native born Americans of all groups, but in particular white native born Americans, on account of either or both of their native-born status or race.

Most opponents of immigration are motivated by both sorts of consideration, though the proportions vary from one person to another.

Aside:

The latter motivation is fed by but predates fears specific to Islamic immigration, based on the current global outburst of Muslim terrorism and outright war directed at other Muslims, Muslim regimes, and anybody else in the entire world within reach of enough Muslims who want to attack.

The Muslims, after all, are the new Communists, having replaced the latter as global public enemy number one.

And that is so despite the fact that they, again like the reds of the old days, are broken up into numerous sects and tribes that are often reciprocally antipathetic and sometimes even hostile to the point of violence.

Or despite the fact that, unlike the reds, they are a centuries old movement that has been a global public enemy, though not continuously number one, since Islam first appeared, drenched in blood, on the Arabian Peninsula.

Geert Wilders was actually historically accurate when he pointed out that, in modern lingo, Islam was an exceptionally violent totalitarian political ideology and movement from its birth, and has in the years since the disappearance of European and Soviet Communism become so, again.

Only a boob thinks totalitarianism has to be secular in ideology.

/Aside.

Personally, if I were a liberal I would be wary of loudly trumpeting the inevitability of a Democratic victory.

That news would of course diminish rather than enhance the Democrat vote, possibly to the point of losing.

Update 061214

Or maybe not.

Kevin Drum

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

So long as the goose keeps laying

How flexible is moral discourse!

How varied its views and judgments!

How important to control it!


And if the goose cannot keep on?

Oh, well.

Apres nous, le deluge.

La Fontaine?

Aesop?

What did they know?

Or what does it matter?

What Christianity made of Ireland; what Ireland made of Christianity

But it was absolutely not only Ireland that was possessed by this evil genius of Christianity, itself the product of wretchedly ordinary humanity.

Home babies treated as 'sub-species'

The animal badness of humans will always out.

We see it in the ways of yesterday.

Someone tomorrow will see it in our ways.

Our weapons have far outrun our defenses

Male faces 'evolved to take punches'

Another step toward the total surveillance society

La Fontaine and the efficacy of petitionary prayer

6/18, The carter stuck in the mud.

Just as well he gave this one a pagan setting.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Evidences of egoism

Vast seas of desperate poverty in which the rich remain rich, and even get richer, as far as they can.

And give away just enough for applause, and not quite enough to be criticized.

Certainly nothing they expect to miss.

And those who give too much are condemned as no example for sensible folk.

We are, after all, a capitalist society.

Capitalism runs on "enlightened self-interest," so understood that more money is always better, and will certainly be put to your own purposes.

Of course, those purposes might be anything.

But we know those purposes are overwhelmingly egoistic, anyway non-altruistic, ignoring the interests or purposes of others so far as possible, with only a few exceptions for people very close to us, and not as leftists dreaming of a "new man" might want them to be.

And if those egoistic purposes were too much frustrated by any of the multifarious coercive measures available to society the fundamental motivation of the capitalist system would be significantly undermined.

And however true it may be that people do not choose their work, however arduous, solely with a view to the biggest paycheck some degree of exceptional cash reward above the common is in fact almost always a crucial motivating element.

Of course, an alternative to the carrot is the stick.

Not necessarily naked bayonets, but coercion, all the same.

Like so many communist societies drumming up "volunteer" labor to work in the fields, especially at harvest time, for "non-material incentives."

How exactly would that have worked, motivating Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?

Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, feminists, gay rightsers, race hucksters, reds, all of them

They all have a crackpot faith they want to make everyone live by.

Some crackpots faiths are more dangerous than others, but they are all crackpot and all dangerous in some degree.

The rape epidemic that justifies an administration power play on campus


If you really want to stop having sex with a guy you’ve been cavorting with like a pair of rabbits  for months, probably you should get out of the bed.

Just a thought.

And what, really, should we think that particular “rapist” deserves?

She was tired and couldn’t be bothered to get out of the bed, or throw him out.

To such exertion, she preferred being “raped.”

This sort of thing makes one doubt the sanity, or sincerity, of O and his Justice Department.

Using such BS as an excuse to impose further federal control of private schools - or public ones!

All of this is just way  too red guard for me.

I find it disturbing, to use a favorite PC lib-speak word.

Actually, alarming.

Just another aspect of America's fast spreading creeping totalitarianism.

A legal kind of bribe, I would guess


A back-room deal of the sort of which LBJ was a master.

Or Lincoln, as depicted in Spielberg’s film.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

"Our master is our enemy"

Fable 6/8, The old man and the ass.

Un Vieillard sur son Âne aperçut en passant
Un prĂ© plein d’herbe et fleurissant :
Il y lâche sa bête, et le grison se rue
Au travers de l’herbe menue,
Se vautrant, grattant, et frottant,
Gambadant, chantant, et broutant,
Et faisant mainte place nette.
L’ennemi vient sur l’entrefaite :
« Fuyons, dit alors le Vieillard.
– Pourquoi ? rĂ©pondit le paillard ;
Me fera-t-on porter double bât, double charge ?
– Non pas ? dit le Vieillard, qui prit d’abord le large.
– Et que m’importe donc, dit l’Ă‚ne, Ă  qui je sois ?
Sauvez-vous, et me laissez paître.
Notre ennemi, c’est notre maĂ®tre :
Je vous le dis en bon français. »

Note the only place in his fables La Fontaine expressed a political skepticism that cannot have been welcome to the court, in his day.

Or a political leftism quite unexpected. 

Marital rape and marital duty

Over the centuries when Christian morals were accepted and enforced by society and the state, though details varied, sex outside of marriage was illegal and actually punished.

Both adultery and fornication were crimes.

Divorce was impossible or, where Protestants controlled, allowed only for adultery proved in open court with a publicly identified correspondent.

Lawsuits were possible for alienation of affection.

The only moral and sometimes only lawful purpose of marriage and sex being procreation, and both parties to a marriage having quite literally forsaken all others as possible partners in marriage, procreation, and sex, marriage could be annulled for male impotence or established infertility of either party.

And of course contraception as well as sexual practices that could not result in pregnancy were viewed as profoundly corrupt, immoral, and sinful, and so were illegal, as abortion was.

Marriage itself was considered a moral, if not a legal, duty for all who did not elect religious celibacy.

And sexual availability within marriage was a moral and legal duty of both parties, sometimes coercible by civil or ecclesiastical authority.

All of this, of course, was reflected and supported by a very thorough, intolerant, and repressive moral censorship of culture, high and low, elite and mass.

When the state, the church, and the public truly and profoundly share those beliefs and attitudes, there can be no such crime as marital rape.

Just another glimpse of what the culture war is all about.

And what conservatives have defended as "upholding marriage," over the centuries and even quite recently.

All of this was reality throughout the Occident as recently as the first half of the 20th Century.

And so in living memory.

That was the reality of "The Greatest Generation," for example, and the generation of The Great War.

Imagine that.

P.S.

It is notorious that, at least through Stalin's reign, communism in Russia vigorously enforced laws regarding sex and marriage, and taught a suitable morality, not far at all from Christian tradition.
Likewise, the Enlightenment did not attack any of this.

On the contrary.

From Voltaire to at least the mid-20th Century, liberals themselves, at least publicly, accepted and supported not just Christian morality but its enforcement by society and the state.

O tempora! O mores!

P.P.S.

In the news lately has been an Irish home for unwed mothers run right into the 1960's where a mass grave containing several hundred corpses of illegitimate children was found.

Homes for unwed mothers were all over the Occident right up to the mid-20th Century.

Perhaps not all such places of horror.

The Irish reporter who broke the story clearly had problems with the existence of such a place and dissaproved of the "society of shame" that produced it.

Despite decades of forthright liberal and feminist efforts through public onslaughts of organized fury and various other devices to turn ours into just such a society of shame regarding thoughts and deeds they disapprove.

P.P.P.S.

Before the middle of the 20th Century, in movies and pop culture holy water and crucifixes were a perfectly efficacious defense against vampires.

Not any more.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Not disobedience. Flagrant lying.

LA jail conditions 'unconstitutional'

Sure thing.

Minitrue

Colombia to set up truth commission

What do we know about coercive rituals of public confession and reconciliation?

What do we know about official truth?

We know the left loves both.

We know the left agrees with the Holy Office that error has no rights and those who publicly espouse it should be silenced, made to recant, and punished, with or without public ceremonies of shame or reconciliation, as the occasion demands.

It used to be only the radical left, the so-called "hard" left, that went in for that, the rest being liberals committed to the Enlightenment values of freedom of speech and of the press.

Freedom from censorship of ideas or political controversy, that is, not from suppression of pornography, obscenity, or even mere profanity.

In Orwell's 1984, of course, error again has no rights.

For that matter, neither does truth, if politically inconvenient.

But morals censorship has been abolished to make way for the political neutering of the masses with abundant prolefeed.

Imagine that.

We


Universally shared medical records on-line.

Employers, bankers, libraries, doctors, bookstores, grocery stores, retailers, and every piddling Mom and Pop keep computerized, hackable records on all of us.

Some judge in some state said traffic camera records are valid evidence in court.

And more cameras are put up to watch us, everywhere, every day.

As for this about listening, do you really think the US government, or any government, will cool it because its constitution says it should?

"Totalitarianism" was abused when used of Hitler and Stalin.

The real thing comes when government sees and hears and so can control your every moment.

Elective, republican totalitarianism, in our case.

There are two ways this can go

Ezra K

If the climate change flaks are right - there is a problem, humans are causing it, and humans could or could have stopped it at a cost that is worse as time passes and will soon become impossible altogether - then so is he.

He is right that we won't do anything remotely like what the climate alarmists demand.

Neither we Americans nor anyone in the world.

So this could be how humans go extinct.

Well, that was coming, eventually, anyway.

I like the Duck Dynasty, quasi-hippy look, myself

Juan Cole

But it might also be, in this case, aptly described as a deserter, defector, American Taliban look.

If the stories are true.

Novelty takes time

Coping with a new HP laptop,  a Pavilion with Windows 8.1 Update.

My older laptop is on Vista Home Premium.

Quite a change.

What does it say, that someone would want such a book?

Harvard skinbook

Scruton scrutinized

Reform conservatism?

Per Jeff Spross,

He criticizes the “frontier” individualist strain in much right-wing thinking, pointing out that “the human individual is a social construct,” that individual freedom emerges out of our relations to others, and that government is a natural emergent property of this impulse “to hold each other to account for what we do.”

So much BS, so little time.

 “the human individual is a social construct,”

No, it's not.

individual freedom emerges out of our relations to others

As does slavery, serfdom, etc. Talk about cherry-picking.

government is a natural emergent property of this impulse “to hold each other to account for what we do.”

No, it is a natural result of the coercion, struggle, and violence typical of human sociability.

Don't let's moralize it or pretty it up.

He reports Scruton writes,

On the liberal view, therefore, government is the art of seizing and then redistributing the good things to which all citizens have a claim. . . .

Maybe not "is." Perhaps "ought to be."

On this view government is not the expression of a preexisting social order shaped by our free agreements and our natural disposition to hold our neighbor to account.

So far as I know, RS is the first to express so succinct a libertarianism.

But it is true liberals are not libertarians.

As to his straw liberal view, well, who can say.

It is the creator and manager of a social order framed according to its ruling doctrine of fairness and imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees.

All government is "imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees."

It is force backed by baloney, be it religious or moral, except when it is raw force not pretending to be backed by either.

Wherever this liberal conception prevails, government increases its power, while losing its inner authority.

Straw.

It becomes the “market-state” of Philip Bobbitt, which offers a deal to its citizens in return for their taxes, and demands no loyalty or obedience beyond a respect for the agreed terms of the deal.

Actually, that sounds more like the libertarian view of what government ought to be, and nobody's view of what it is.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

As were the Hitler Youth, no doubt

Photos: Tiananmen Protesters Were Heartbreakingly Young, Earnest, and Happy

Such cheap bullshit.

Leave it to the Times

Look, I want to see this movie and I enjoy Tom Cruise.

But even so the Times' sex role/sex reality bullshit here is a bit thick, with this review approving of the film's Tarzana as a praiseworthy, artistic representation of a "strong woman" character.

And then there was Maude.

And the Times loved her.

P.S.

It ain't just the Times.

It's the unified voice of the liberal/libertarian/secularist cultural established.

My wife showed me the review in EW, #1315, June 13, 2014.

Almost giggling with enthusiasm, Chris Nashawaty writes,

It's being sold to the public as a Tom Cruise movie.

But deep down, it's the most feminist summer action flick in years.

Since Ripley's last set-to with the aliens, in fact.

The profound cruelty of the draft

Eddie Slovick

Not a thing in the world he could do about it.

A shortcoming harmless to others, most likely, all his life, had he not been carried off to a stupid war America had no need to be involved in.

And then murdered for being wholly unsuited for the job.

Like an agoraphobe kidnapped for high iron work, and then shot for his incapacity.

And pour encourager les autres.

Emptying Gitmo

On the radio this morning the story was that White House insiders say O plans to empty and close Gitmo, and have all our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, by the end of his term.

Since they plan on releasing everybody anyway they thought it would be good to get something in return.

So they got Bergdahl, I think the last US prisoner.

So now the flap is, again, about whether to close Gitmo, those opposed arguing the remaining 80 prisoners or so, who somebody said cannot and will not ever be tried, will continue to be dangerous and can be expected to resume their careers as terrorists if released, ever.

Which is pretty much why we never let serial killers out.

The administration argument is that wars come to an end and then prisoners of war are released.

The critics say the war is not over merely because the US decided to call it a day.

But if the US regards itself as no longer legally at war with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the US can handle their terrorists only by way of ordinary criminal procedure.

So the US has to release them or convict them, and the US doesn’t even want to try them.

Btw, right down through the Civil War, it was not unusual for POWs to be released during a war, on their promise not to resume fighting.

Americans so released sometimes simply went home, personally done with the wars in question.

Leon Panetta in Pittsburgh on the question

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Inequality

The advantages of capitalism over socialism cannot be had without significant inequalities not only as regards ownership of the means of production but in particular and especially of personal wealth.

And I refer to advantages accruing even to the poor.

Government meddling

There is no reason to sympathize with government power thus exercised to back the private interests of museums and academics over others.

Or simply grabbing things.

Fossil smuggling?

My sympathies are with private collectors, and even poachers, over governments and over museums and academics whose interests are served by this sort of government looting.

The idea that art, archeological, and paleontological treasures belong, no matter what, to governments or universities or other agencies supported by government is liberal moral bunk.

So O broke the law, doing this?

Congress in a dither about the Bergdahl release.

Putin speaks up

Not a word of criticism of the USA you might not hear from the non-interventionist left or right.

Muslim violence in Belgium

The objection brought by this journal of propaganda for the educated Jewry is that the wrong narrative dominates.

Not that I like the dominant narrative, myself.

But they obviously don't want to even hint we might have a problem with the idea that whose narrative dominates the media also dominates politics.

Well, it's man against mass society, I guess.

Who's winning?

Btw, the O administration is just flat wrong on Syria, was wrong on Libya and Egypt, was wrong on Turkey where they sided against Ataturk's generals, and was just as wrong as the neoconservatives on Afghanistan.

The globalist democracy exporters have, hand in glove with the American Likudniks, royally screwed the pooch all over the Muslim world.

Global Islamic Jihad is funded by European and American petro-dollars and assisted by the refusal of the West to resist for fear of economic attack.

America is just not ready to stand aside, quit meddling, end all foreign aid, and let the dogs still in the pit devour each other.

Thank God I won't have to live through another 65 years of this stupidity.

P.S. And still Tom is right about much

More than that?


BS, native-born American citizen and Israeli agent of influence writes,

When Nixon won in 1968, he embarked on a presidency in which he never once had control of both houses of Congress.

He faced an endless bitter assault from the media and from the so-called intellectuals -- the "pointy-headed" intellectuals, as George Wallace aptly called them.

Nevertheless, he ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POWs and calmed the wild streets.

More than that, he saved Israel when it was threatened with annihilation by its neighbors, sending a massive airlift of arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Nixon gave unequivocal support to Israel: Johnson could not have cared less about its fate.

Many American born Jews are second only to foreign-born immigrant refugees in thinking of America as first, last, and always a military resource to be used to launch attacks on behalf of the people, nation, or country abroad whose interests, far more than America's, occupy their hearts.

Cuban-Americans of the second and third generation are pretty bad, too.

Did Nixon really signal any such thing as Stein says below?

And what Russian “hopes of global domination”?

Phooey.

Nixon opened relations with Red China that greatly sobered up Russia and allowed the U.S. to become the world's dominant power and peacekeeper for a generation.

This was the key event in ending the Cold War.

By "encircling" the USSR and signaling that if Leonid Brezhnev began a war against either the United States or China, he would face a dreaded two-front war, he showed Russia that its hopes of global domination were not going to work.

To soothe matters with the still extremely dangerous Russian bear, he even signed a strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviets.

Apart from that, in many ways I agree with BS’s estimate of Nixon and the way he was treated.

It is interesting I did not find this in any of his usual conservative venues.

Maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe he freed a traitor.


The American government and the O administration in particular have been downright harsh on Americans going over to the other side in this conflict.

Obama killed an important American al-Qaeda indoctrinator with a drone attack, for which some conservatives now wish to impeach him.

Much earlier in the conflict, “The American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, captured on the battlefield, was sent to prison in 2003 for being on the wrong side, where he rots even today.

And now it seems there is considerable evidence Bergdahl was a defector, or at least a very cooperative prisoner, in the Jihad against the American forces from which he deserted.

So O trades some Gitmo prisoners for him and then shows no sign of even putting him on trial?

For which some conservatives now wish to impeach him.

O tempora; o mores!


Yes, and to the unelected, life tenured federal judiciary, too.

How many ways is this disturbing?


First, hate crimes are usually not terrorism; the requisite intention is lacking.

Second, hate groups do not necessarily aim at terrorizing those they hate, however much they may wish fear upon them.

Third, will the focus be on white hate groups or hate groups of all races?

Fourth, everyone has something to hide; is this just another unconstitutional fishing expedition, at the very least putting people's privacy at risk only because the government disapproves of them?

Civil libertarians of all dispositions should be opposed to this.

But the race angle will doubtless skew that.