Hard to breathe. Racking cough. See you tomorrow, hopefully.
Dec 28 2023
Progressive Jumble [Update]
Have you ever taken notice of the letters that spell out progressive? They can be used to make many new words. But could it be accidental how many of those only or mostly convey unpleasant meanings?
- Vipers
- Grieves
- Grievers
- Gripes
- Gripers
- Gropes
- Gropers
- Pigs
- Spies
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few more. I will leave finding these up to the reader.
But there are other words that do not immediately convey negative meanings. And that suits the Progressive Movement quite well due to their subtle but — demonstrably — brutally frank intentions.
Take the word vise. It is a quite useful tool in the right hands. But not so nice when one finds oneself “caught between a rock and a hard place, ” eh?
Take the word progress. It implies advancement. But for whom does the advance benefit? The Mongol hordes were experts in the feigned retreat. Countless kings all thought they were making progress against them before they found themselves surrounded and wiped out.
Or take the word progressive itself. It is intended to convey proudly leading the public into a better future. But better for whom? The word also means incremental. As in step, by step. Slowly.
————–
Update.
First, I would beg license of Fran’s love of Latin and add rogves to the list.
But far more importantly, I wish you all to take notice how a reader, Spotter, provided three words that should have been included in my list, one of which never even crossed my mind.
Ogres.
Given the atrocities associated with those mythical creatures (abducting and eating children) they indeed belong at the top of this list.
That is because not only have the Progs totally driven the program that has claimed more than 60 million pre-born babies since their push-through of Roe V Wade, they are up to their necks in protecting child molesters and cannibalizers. For years, beginning with Kamala Harris, the California AG has waged an ongoing persecution of one woman journalist simply for exposing Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby parts.
I cannot think of a more fitting word than ogres to be found among the letters in “Progressive.”
Dec 28 2023
“What Works” Versus “What Sounds Good”
Thomas Sowell has many pithy sayings to his credit, but the one that resonates most powerfully with our current maladies is this one:
The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit — replacing what works with what sounds good.
Indeed. Worse yet, oftentimes “what sounds good” would sound just BLEEP!ing terrible if the facts were in evidence. The suppression of inconvenient facts is crucial to the promotion of naïve, ignorant, and often deliberately destructive courses of action.
John Stossel presents a typical case:
In this season of giving, I’ll donate to the Doe Fund, a charity that helps drug abusers and ex-cons find purpose in life through work.
Doe’s approach doesn’t include many handouts. It’s mostly about encouraging people to work.
It does.
Most Doe Fund workers don’t go back to jail.
I’ll also donate to Student Sponsor Partners, a nonprofit that gives scholarships to kids from low-income families so they can escape bad public schools. SSP sends them to Catholic schools.
I’m not Catholic, but I donate because government-run schools are often so bad that Catholic schools do better at half the cost. Thanks to SSP, thousands of kids escape poverty.
Yet some on the left say giving time and money to charity is a mistake. Their trust in government leads them to think that government programs are much better at lifting people out of poverty.
“Charity can distract from permanent solutions,” claims an article in the Harvard Political Review. “Time, effort and funding that are funneled into charitable acts could be redirected to actual solutions spearheaded by the government, which has the resources to implement concrete change.”
Yikes!
Please read it all. Stossel is most circumstantial in his refutation of the Harvard canard. But note: Harvard’s “government…has the resources to implement concrete change” certainly sounds good, and in several ways at that:
- “Concrete change” is used to imply improvement.
- “Resources” invite the reader to infer that government has more wherewithal than private charity, and is therefore more likely to be effective.
- And of course, if private persons and organizations would simply stop soliciting us for funds and let government handle America’s “social needs,” we could all kick back. No more sense of responsibility!
Hard data has established incontrovertibly that not only doesn’t government charity “implement concrete change” of a constructive kind, but that it creates an entitlement culture: one, moreover, that persists through several generations. That’s the effect of handing out checks without continuing supervision of the condition and behavior of the recipients, which is what a government charity bureaucracy does.
Also, government’s “resources” consist of tax revenues: monies collected from private citizens and institutions under the threat of punishment. Because a government charity bureaucracy spends others’ money to provide benefits to others, it has no natural incentive to be either efficient or effective. The incentives just aren’t there…but the incentive to grow the bureaucracy is in place and functioning. Any intelligent reader can see where that will lead — and has led.
Finally, that diminution of private responsibility is a very bad thing, far worse than any words of mine could possibly make it. Hearken to Albert Jay Nock:
Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact — except for certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic asylum, city hospital, and county poorhouse — destitution, unemployment, “depression,” and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living.
Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government”; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for.
It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself accepted. When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigor. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained.
If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them.
We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the State’s relief agency. The State has said to society, “You are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself.” Hence when a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.
Shout it from the rooftops: We need no longer look after one another. The State will do it for us. What follows the inculcation of that attitude?
- Social atomization;
- Antagonism between districts;
- Antagonism between generations;
- Antagonism between economic strata;
- Massive increases in government size, power, and forcible exactions.
And, of course, the metastatic expansion of a parasite class: welfare bureaucrats, those who sell goods and services to them, and the beneficiaries to whom they cater. That parasite class will naturally prefer its own interests to those of “outsiders:” i.e., private, self-supporting citizens. (Cf. Robert Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy.”) History records no exceptions.
But it certainly sounded good, didn’t it?
One final observation before I turn to other responsibilities: The Harvard Political Review is associated with Harvard’s “John F. Kennedy School of Government,” which has trained aspirants to positions within government since 1936. If it is not yet clear that such an institution will favor the expansion of government power, involvements, and revenues over time, I can’t imagine how to make it clearer. For the Kennedy School is one more in yet another category of parasites: a one-step-removed ally to those who wish to have the State supreme over all things. It will always argue for the primacy of the State, the expansion of its role, and an excess of “tolerance” for the negative consequences thereof.
But it has a lovely façade of “intellectualism” about it, doesn’t it? And with that we return to the Thomas Sowell quote at the beginning of this tirade.
Dec 27 2023
Mask Droppings
FORBES was once proud to call itself a “capitalist tool.” That’s some years back now. Today the magazine peddles tendentious twaddle:
Why ‘Doing Your Own Research’ May Make You Believe Fake News
In an age in which misinformation abounds, how do you determine what is real and what is fake? New research suggests telling truth from fiction may be more difficult that many people realise.
Following a series of experiments, a team of U.S. researchers found that study participants were consistently 19% more likely to believe “fake news” after they had performed an online search to figure out the truth.
That’s important, the experts say, because the prevalence and success of such misinformation poses a direct threat to democracy.
Kevin Aslett, assistant professor in the School of Politics, Security and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida, and a lead author of the paper published this week in Nature, explains.
“In terms of political consequences, increased belief in misinformation has the potential to increase political cynicism and apathy towards politics, lower trust in reliable media sources, increase polarization [and] motivate political violence,” Aslett tells me. He references the events of January 6, 2021, in which a mob attacked the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., saying “these consequences weaken democracy.”
The author of this article, David Vetter, describes himself thus:
David’s key interests are in climate change and sustainable systems. A veteran journalist, he recently completed an MSc in Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford.
You’re free to follow your own guidelines, but if someone who bills himself that way were to tell me that the sky is blue, I’d run outside to check. I can’t reproduce the whole article here – fair use provisions would not permit it – so if you have access to it, note all the “giveaway” words and phrases it uses:
- fake news
- misinformation
- disinformation
- vaccine misinformation
- climate action
- renewable energy
- right-wing
- conspiracist
- threat to democracy
- interdisciplinary
I’ll continue to do my own research and trust my own judgment – especially about politically polarizing subjects. I’ve learned that you can’t trust a David Vetter on subjects such as “sustainability” and “climate change.” But given that, on what subjects could you trust him?
Dec 27 2023
Declining Temperatures
No, this isn’t about “climate change.” The temperatures I have in mind measure the warmth of other countries’ regimes toward Americans.
Apparently, Americans who dare to leave the increasingly questionable security of these United States to pursue activities in other nations are in danger of being kidnapped – by those nations’ governments:
The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population. In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D” for the risk of detention.
Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states.
[…]
U.S. corporations that once imagined their futures in mainland China have largely stopped sending executives to the world’s second-largest economy, for fear they’ll get stuck there. American athletes and chess grandmasters whose predecessors competed in Moscow through some of the Cold War’s tensest moments stepped back from that peacemaking tradition after Russia arrested basketball gold medalist Brittney Griner on drug charges. Following Gershkovich’s arrest, even Western news agencies that based foreign correspondents in Moscow under Joseph Stalin pulled out. In a remarkable restriction on American travel freedoms, the U.S. currently bans its passport holders from entering North Korea, to avoid handing supreme leader Kim Jong Un another human pawn.
Now, it’s hardly a secret that there are countries that don’t like us much. However, the kidnapping of foreign nationals was once regarded as a casus belli. That’s how Thomas Jefferson regarded it, anyway. He sent a sizable force into the Mediterranean to put a stop to it. You may recall the phrase “Barbary pirates,” which referred to Berber Muslims’ practice of capturing Americans and American-flagged vessels and holding them for ransom.
It seems we’re more sophisticated today. Private pirates seldom take Americans captive for ransom. Instead, governments do it.
Unfortunately, the Usurper Administration doesn’t seem to grasp the nub of the thing:
The Biden administration, which spent months debating how to bring home Americans while deterring others from being taken, has attempted a pairing of concessions and threats. It has openly and explicitly acknowledged its willingness to make prisoner trades—a signal its predecessors were reluctant to send—while pledging tougher sanctions for offenders. [Emphasis added]
Once a captive’s freedom becomes purchasable for a price, a market has formed. The trade in captives will accelerate. The sole question is at what price the market will stabilize.
A story I’ve used more than once, which dates back to the Seventies, illustrates two contrasting approaches to this atrocity:
“It seems that, back then, Islamic terrorists preferred to ransom infidel captives rather than kill them. They took quite a number of such captives, and for a while they received a great deal of money for them. One group that had made a pile kidnapping and ransoming Westerners decided to try the game on a Soviet agent. But the KGB didn’t respond the way their Western victims’ governments had. Instead it performed a counter-kidnapping of one of the group’s members, and returned him to his confreres in pieces, in a plastic bag. There was a note on the bag, in Russian and Arabic. It said, ‘This is the way we play.’ The kidnapped Soviet agent was back with his comrades within twenty-four hours, alive and whole. No Soviet agent was molested ever again.”
As I say all too often, verbum sat sapienti.
Time was, it was pirates – the masters of privately-owned vessels that ranged the seas – that took captives, ransomed them, and often sold them into slavery. Piracy has been understood to be a heinous crime for many centuries. Pirates are regarded as “enemies of all Mankind,” and thus are deemed outlaw by all the nations of the world…at least, formally. But when governments practice piracy, what then?
It’s a difficult subject. I wrote about it in a fictional setting. Stephen Graham Sumner got away with his brinksmanship, but since Kennedy no American president has been willing to openly threaten nuclear assault on another nuclear power. The downside risk is daunting, to say the least.
But when the government of another nuclear state turns pirate, and seeks to ransom captive American citizens for “concessions” or a “prisoner exchange,” what alternatives to threatening nuclear annihilation exist? Economic sanctions have achieved little. So the horror of international trade in human lives continues as before…and the price sovereign pirates demand for their “goods” continues to escalate.
Dec 26 2023
Missing The Point
It’s difficult for me to imagine how some people live with their spinelessness:
Carols by Candlelight is the largest annual fundraiser for Vision Australia’s children’s services, which provides support to families and children who are blind or have low vision.
A crowd of 10,000 gathered to enjoy the live broadcast, celebrate the Christmas holiday, and provide support for children in need.
The event was disrupted, however, when pro-Palestine protesters stormed across the stage while children were performing and began ranting about Gaza and raising Palestinian flags.
“Well, it is the climate, isn’t it?” a female host said.
“It’s okay, everybody, we are actually fine here… Everyone’s allowed to have their… moment… It’s a very hard time in this world… There’s a lot of pain out there that people are experiencing,” another host said.
“Everyone’s allowed to have their moment” — ? What the host appears to have missed – or deliberately averted – is that these “pro-Palestinian protesters” believe that all moments are “their moment.” In fact, they don’t want anyone else to “have their moment.” If they can, they will commandeer anyone else’s “moment” regardless of any and all other considerations.
This isn’t a run-of-the-mill case of people excessively passionate about a Cause. It’s a demonstration of one of the Left’s guides to action. It was once phrased “No justice, no peace” – according to their notions of “justice” and “peace.” They will disrupt, degrade, and destroy anything anyone else loves, enjoys, or benefits from until they get what they want.
It’s an Alinsky-compliant tactic: one they enjoy. Its pleasures combine the humiliation of others with the assertion of their own amorality and ruthlessness. The subtext, of course, is that “You can’t stop us.”
In point of fact, “we” could stop them. All it would take is for us to rise above our inhibitions against confrontation. But those inhibitions against confrontation, so far, have proved stronger than our anger and revulsion at their shamelessness. And when I say that, I feel myself growing ashamed of “us.”
That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. I need a big drink.
Dec 26 2023
Sick as a dog
I don’t know quite what I have. It’s a respiratory virus, it hit my lungs, and it knocked me off of my feet yesterday. Literally. I could be up for about five minutes and then I had to go lay back down. My fever broke last night, and I seem to be getting better. At least I’m not coughing as much. I hit it with everything in my medicine cabinet, to include Ivermectin and zinc. Hopefully I’ll be up and about by tomorrow, the dogs are giving me the hairy eyeballs as they haven’t had a walk in two days.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and may the upcoming new year bring you joy and peace.
Dec 26 2023
National Treasures
No, this isn’t about the movie, though I must admit that I enjoyed it greatly. Then again, I’m a Nicolas Cage fan. I’m thinking of a few writers and thinkers whom I might never have encountered if not for the World Wide Web. There are several…and some of them get much less appreciation than they deserve. To them, I offer these belated Christmas presents.
One of that neglected group is Chaya Raichik, the person behind the much-celebrated Twitter account Libs of Tiktok:
Remember when the @nytimes journalists lost their minds and a chief editor had to resign because they ran an op-ed by a sitting US Senator?
Well now the New York Times is running opinion pieces written by Hamas.
Are their journalists outraged? 🤔
NYT showing their true colors! pic.twitter.com/aXpwGKngKn
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) December 25, 2023
Another is the website ZeroHedge:
Modernity could be described as humanity’s accelerating pace of technological advancement. Part of that advancement is the ever increasing level of intellectual abstraction.
If you’ve been a member or following my writings long enough, you’ll have heard me talk about the W R Clement book, Quantum Jump; written in 1998, it ascribed the entire scientific revolution from the Enlightenment onwards, to the discovery of perspective (then called “God’s space”), in art….
That “quantum leap” began the process of rewiring all our brains for ever higher levels of intellectual abstraction. It enabled us to go from ownership of a coal mine, for example, being ascribed to whomever physically occupied the space – including militarily – to people, and even corporatized entities like pension funds or investment clubs, owning fractional pieces of that mine, from far off places, even other countries.
Initially we did this using physical pieces of paper to represent that ownership. There is a scene in an Agatha Christie “Miss Marple” mystery, “The Moving Finger”, where a man of leisure (played by William D’Arcy) takes to convalesce in a small cottage in a country town, and he visits the local barrister to register his securities with him, reaching into the inside pocket of his sport jacket and handing him the physical share certificates.
Today, he’d just handle everything from a smart phone he carries around in his jeans.
That’s increasing abstraction.
A day spent pondering the modern progression from ownership as possession to “ownership” as a claim administered by some faceless agency immune to correction would not be wasted.
I think Zoroaster would have heartily agreed with my third selection, the perpetually embattled yet apparently undaunted Robert Spencer:
The claim that the Israelis drove the Muslim Arabs out of what is today the modern state of Israel is a historical myth: they were told to leave by the Arab League in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The Arab League was promising to destroy Israel in a matter of weeks, after which they could return. Nevertheless, they now claim to have been driven out, making the destruction of Israel a matter of fulfilling the immutable will of Allah.
With these kinds of ideas in mind, the preacher continued: “And I said to him: ‘You are protecting the remaining dignity and honor, and some kind of respect for this nation.’ So I always make that supplication. When you think about it that way, that they are protecting the remaining dignity, the remaining sort of… kind of like… to show some power of this nation – it is our brothers and sisters in Gaza. We ask Allah to protect them. We ask Allah to grant them victory.” The nature of the victory he envisioned, however, should make every non-Muslim’s blood run cold.
“Oh Allah,” the cleric began his prayer, “punish the infidels, come upon them from wherever they do not expect. Oh Allah, instill fear into their hearts. Oh Allah, destroy their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. Oh Allah, let us inherit their homes, wealth, and land where we have not set foot yet. Oh Allah, turn them, their wealth, their children, and their lives into booty for Islam and the Muslims. Oh Allah, turn them into booty for Islam and the Muslims.” Yes, he really said that. Read it again.
Do not imagine that Spencer’s long tenure in the unenviable position of one who “speaks truth and shoots the arrow straight” about Islam, its innate hostility to all that it does not utterly dominate, and especially its ravening hatred for Israel, means that he is safe and secure. He’s not, any more than was Pim Fortuyn, or Theo van Gogh, or the late, lamented staff at Charlie Hebdo.
Finally, let me not forget my favorite among contemporary commentators, whose oeuvre has never received the appreciation it and he deserve: the inimitable Roger Kimball:
Much that is happening in the spectacle of America’s legal-political life today reminds me of some pages in Johan Huizinga’s great book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938). In a chapter on “Play and Law,” Huizinga distinguishes the unfolding of legal proceedings in advanced cultures, where strict adherence to process and abstract notions of right and wrong prevail, from the situation in more primitive cultures, where the ultimate criterion is victory. “Turning our eyes from the administration of justice and highly developed civilizations,” Huizinga writes, “to that which obtains in less advanced phases of culture, we see that the idea of right and wrong, the ethical-juridical conception, comes to be overshadowed by the idea of winning and losing, that is, the purely agonistic conception. It is not so much the abstract question of right and wrong that occupies the archaic mind as the very concrete question of winning or losing.”
In this sense, I submit, Special Counsel Jack Smith, District Judge Tanya Chutkan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the rest of the anti-Trump legal confraternity perfectly epitomize the atavistic persistence of archaic impulses in the law. People like me are always going on about “the rebarbarization of civilization.” The peculiar legal assault against Donald Trump is one instance (among many) of that phenomenon.
Honor them, for we cannot know how much longer we have to enjoy them.
More anon.
Dec 25 2023
December 25, 2023
Ponder this:
When God came to Earth, there was no room in the inn, but there was room in the stable. What lesson is hidden behind the inn and the stable?
What is an inn, but the gathering-place of public opinion, the focal point of the world’s moods, the residence of the worldly, the rallying place of the fashionable and those who count in the management of the world’s affairs? What is a stable, but the place of outcasts, the refuge of beasts, and the shelter of the valueless, and therefore the symbol of those who in the eyes of public opinion do not count and hence may be ignored as of no great value or moment? Anyone in the world would have expected to find Divinity in an inn, but no one would have expected to have found it in a stable….
If, in those days, the stars of the heavens by some magic touch had folded themselves together as silver words and announced the birth of the Expected of the Nations, where would the world have gone in search of Him?
The world would have searched for the Babe in some palace by the Tiber, or in some gilded house of Athens, or in some inn of a great city where gathered the rich, the mighty, and the powerful ones of Earth. They would not have been the least surprised to have found the newborn King of Kings stretched out on a cradle of gold and surrounded by kings and philosophers paying Him their tribute and obeisance.
But they would have been surprised to have discovered Him in a manger, laid on coarse straw and warmed by the breath of oxen, as if in atonement for the coldness of the hearts of men. No one would have expected that the One whose fingers could stop the turning of Arcturus would be smaller than the head of an ox; that He who could hurl the ball of fire into the heavens would one day be warmed by the breath of beats; that He who could make a canopy of stars would be shielded from a stormy sky by the roof of a stable; or that He who made the Earth as His future home would be homeless at home. No one would have expected to find Divinity in such a condition; but that is because Divinity is always where you least expect to find it….
The world has always sought Divinity in the power of a Babel, but never in the weakness of a Bethlehem. It has searched for it in the inns of popular opinion, but never in the stable of the ignored. It has looked for it in the cradles of gold, but never in the cribs of straw – always in power, but never in weakness.
And also:
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.[Luke 2:8-20]
Merry Christmas, Gentle Reader. May God, who gave us His Son to walk the earth, proclaim the New Covenant, and redeem us of our sins through His Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, bless and keep you all.
Dec 24 2023
They Who Have Not Joy
There are…people whose entire mission in life is to despoil the lives of others. Any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch will be able to name a few categories thereof. But just now, we’re seeing one of the most odious of all in inglorious death-dealing Technicolor®: the rabid anti-Semites who cheer whenever a “Palestinian” murders an Israeli Jew:
Pro-Palestinian protesters just disrupted a Christmas tree lighting celebration in Ypsilanti, Michigan, chanting as crowds gathered for the annual event in the city’s historic district pic.twitter.com/bpuCB50n89
— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) November 27, 2023
These utter swine are determined to extinguish any visible or audible sign that normal people are enjoying themselves. As a Christmas tree lighting has nothing to do with the Jewish people or Israel, what other conclusion is possible?
What I find myself wondering at moments like these are whether the “protestors” have anything in their minds or hearts but hatred. It seems dubious.
I’ve written about such people here and here. Some profess a faith; others don’t. All are despoilers. They are not numerous, but they are organized, mobilized, and militant. They will turn up wherever they have a prospect of ruining someone else’s joy.
And we’re not allowed to shoot them. Not with real bullets, anyway.
I say it’s time for fire hoses if not water cannons. Does anyone have a better suggestion?
Apologies, Gentle Reader. It’s an unworthy topic for Christmas Eve, except that…well, never mind. Enjoy your day, which is also the fourth and last Sunday of Advent. And if I don’t see you tomorrow, have a very Merry Christmas.
Dec 24 2023
Things You Do Not Want To Hear Around Christmastime
1. On the phone:
“Mr. Porretto, my name is John Smith, and I’m with the Internal Revenue Service.”
2. From your Significant Other:
“There’s water seeping out from under the kitchen cabinets.”
3. From anyone, anywhere:
“Say, doesn’t that guy look a lot like John McClane?
Got any favorites of your own, Gentle Readers?
Dec 22 2023
Evil does exist
Ahem.
So far the Biden Administration has lost over 85,000 unaccompanied minors–they take them in at the border, process them, fly them around the country, and they are never seen or heard from again.
If you or I did this, it would be human trafficking. Federal contractors do it every day.
Not all of them are going into sex slavery. Some of them are going into normal slavery, where they work all day for someone else and are kept in unhealthy conditions at night until they’re pulled out again the next morning for another day of labor.
Remember, the FBI knew who was using Jeffery Epstein’s child sex slaves. They had all the logs, the photos, the videos, the evidence. Has any of Epstein’s clients seen the inside of a courtroom? Of course they haven’t.
The FBI is protecting their friends in the government. Mostly in the Democrat Party. You know it, I know it, and by now they know that we know it.
Ann Barnhardt often points out that Diabolical Narcissists enjoy getting away with their crimes and flaunting it in front of your face. I can see no better example than what we’re observing at the border. And you can rest assured that many of those “unaccompanied minors” will end up crying and/or drugged into subservience while they’re raped by Democrats and Democrat allies over and over and over and over and over.
The people in this government who are allowing this, or supporting this, all need to be hung, publicly, until dead, and then their corpses left to rot and feed the crows. The pain and suffering that they have caused, and are now causing, cries out for appropriate punishment, but we here on earth cannot give appropriate punishment. Only God can do that. But I have no problem ensuring the meeting is sped up a bit.
Dec 22 2023
I Can Hear The Anguish In This Man’s Voice
Malcolm Pollack asks a painful question:
[I]s there no point at which kinetic war against people who hate you and seek to subjugate you is justified? As stewards of the American nation we inherited from our forebears to preserve and cherish, and now crumbling before our eyes, where does our duty lie? A great many decent, patient, forgiving, and conscientious Americans are beginning to ask themselves this previously unthinkable question. Nobody else is coming to save us.
It’s easy, looking at history, to follow the stories of the decline and fall of nations and empires, in which the span of decades or centuries may pass in a day’s reading. To “zoom out”, though, when one is embedded in history in real time is another thing altogether, and far more difficult. But we are, at this point, rushing headlong past all of the familiar mile-posts.
I don’t know the answer. Do you, Gentle Reader?
[Applause to WRSA for the link to this article.]
Dec 22 2023
They’re At It Again
Some of the Establishment’s dance steps are fresh. Others are well rehearsed and easy to recognize:
Jim Messina, a former top aide to former President Obama, claimed that a “third-party candidate can’t win in 2024” and might guarantee former President Trump does.
“With a rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump almost set in stone, it’s time to put a farce to rest: The notion that a third-party candidate could actually win the presidency in 2024,” Messina wrote in an op-ed for Politico.
[…]
“While a third-party candidate can’t win, No Labels could still throw the election to Trump, and it wouldn’t take that many votes,” Messina wrote, explaining that the past two elections indicate that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin may again swing the election for President Biden or Trump, the current favorite to be his Republican opponent.
“A No Labels candidate in these states could easily hand the election to Trump,” Messina wrote.
I recall that the Democrats were happy about the “third party” candidacy of H. Ross Perot in 1992. That candidacy deflected votes mainly from the Republican candidate, incumbent president George H. W. Bush. But then, in 2000, they were unhappy about the “third party” candidacy of Ralph Nader, who deflected votes mainly from the Democrat candidate, Al Gore Jr. So it seems that their tolerance for minor-party participation is a variable thing, according to which candidate they expect to suffer from it.
In point of fact: A third party candidate can win a federal office. At least, it’s happened in the past. Abraham Lincoln was a third-party candidate for president in 1860. A third party candidate for U.S. Senate, John C. Fremont, won a Senate seat for California in 1850. A third party candidate from Alaska, Andre Marrou, served in Congress from 1985 to 1987. There may have been others; I’m not as informed about such things as I once was.
In recent years, the stranglehold the major parties have over campaign funding, media exposure, and the Committee on Presidential Debates has made third party presidential candidacies largely an exercise in promoting particular ideas. However, contemporary disgust with both the major parties – you’ve heard them called the “Uniparty,” haven’t you? – could magnify the importance of one or more minor parties. At any rate, Messina’s railing against minor-party candidacies is impotent…for the moment.
However, I wouldn’t put anything past today’s political Establishment, no matter how low or despicable. Many sitting federal legislators are feeling a cold draft, to say nothing of the Usurper-in-Chief. We may yet see legal challenges and “lawfare” used to hamper or disqualify the candidates of the Libertarian, Green, Right to Life, Constitutional, and Populist parties. Nor would such attacks necessarily come from the Democrats alone. Stay tuned.
Dec 22 2023
I Was Going To Take The Day Off…
…until I saw this piece at Power Line. As I have a huge disdain for “wine snobs,” it immediately elevated Steven Hayward to my Pantheon of Heroes. A brief “tasting:”
Talking about wine lends itself to the same kind of silly jargon that has justified the fraud called “modern art” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and ruined literary criticism. Someday I’m going to write a book about the subject. I’ll call it Higher Humbug for the Truly Pretentious: How to Sound Like George Plimpton in Three Easy Lessons.
The degradation of criticism through “Deconstructionism” and other preposterous fads may yet achieve the unthinkable: the writing of novels so unreadable that even the critics will look for another line of work.
All you need do is await your host’s solicitation on the evening’s main wine, look thoughtful, and say, “Superb, but—it dies a sudden death on the middle palate.” If you wish to mitigate this cruel blow, you can add, “But it finishes well.”
[C]onsider this assessment of a Chateau Woltner 1987 Chardonnay: “Has an extreme style that’s hard and austere . . . a wine of disjointed character and little charm.” Now, I’ve had my prose described this way, but never my wine.
I think I’ve spotted the next bogus trend. Here’s the Wine Spectator’s rating of Ferrari Carano’s 1988 Fume Blanc: “Rich, intense and concentrated with round, smooth fruit that offers grapefruit, citrus, fig and stone flavors that finish with a soft touch.” “Stone flavors?” I don’t think I want to know.
Read it all. You’ll thank me later.
Critics are people who lack creative talent, but who seek to “horn in” on the labors of creative people with supercilious commentary that’s ultimately meaningless and valueless. Oftentimes it’s not even acceptable English. Moreover, what critics in every era seek to become is an Establishment immune to criticism. Enjoy the irony; I always do.
Myself, I think this timeless, priceless essay does more for the typical wine drinker than any “critic’s” sesquipedalian effusions. But ultimately, it’s a matter of taste…isn’t it?
Dec 21 2023
This Is Too Uplifting Not To Post
It’s been quite a few years since I last dated…thirty-two years, to be exact. So the vicissitudes of the dating-and-mating dance are no longer among my regular concerns. But every now and then I encounter a story that makes me think.
“Think what?” I hear you ask. Well, it might be something along the lines of “Why hasn’t the human race died out yet?” Or perhaps “Have actual men gone extinct?” (We know actual women are getting to be a rare find. Always, always check for “the lump:”)
But there’s a third category of tale that cheers me immensely… the sort of encounter that suggests that just possibly, it’s still possible to defeat the advance of the various pathologies that have turned dating into a tarantella in a minefield. The following is one such:
(Yes, PJW’s commentary in the above is rather snarky. Still, he’s a bright guy. I’d bet he grasped the full significance of the encounter quite as readily as I.)
Apparently, all the young woman above needed to flush the feminist / gender-war static out of her brain was an encounter with an unabashedly masculine man who plays the dating game by the old rules. She didn’t say so explicitly, but it appears that her date was a gentleman, to boot. It might be just that she was ready for a change of perspective, but still, the thing gives me some hope for the future.
Warning, soyboys of America: Real men “got game,” as the saying goes. Moreover, it’s not a set of tricks or techniques you can learn; it’s something you must become. Verbum sat sapienti, dudes. Put down the controllers and get to work on yourselves. Remember who told you so.
Dec 21 2023
The Neglected Front (UPDATED)
Leftists play a “long game.” To them, no setback is permanent. They keep the pressure up until they get what they want. After that, they defend their gains with unbridled viciousness and pseudo-conservative sentiments such as “it’s here to stay.” Thomas Sowell has delineated their practices in several of his books.
The longest “long game” tactic is the corruption of juvenile education. Herewith, three links:
- Choice and selective schools “perpetuate inequity.”
- Equity through Mediocrity.
- Good Versus Evil on the Educational Front.
The Left has been pursuing control of the schools – all the way down to pre-Kindergarten – ever since “public education” became the norm. Leftist strategists have mastered the art of infiltration, colonization, and conquest by which any hierarchical institution can be subverted. They attacked the schools as soon as government shoved its snout into education…and today, the public schools are their conquered territory.
The staggering amounts of money that flow through the government schools give the Left a degree of power over public policy that’s difficult to appreciate. If you’d like a measure for it, find out what percent of your state’s annual expenditures goes to the schools. Then add the federal “support.” Then ask yourself what makes such gargantuan funding necessary?
The Left has been in the vanguard of every campaign to add new “requirements” to public education:
- Sex education? Check.
- Art education? Check.
- School-breakfast and school-lunch programs? Check.
- Counselors of every kind? Check.
- Remedial programs? Check.
- Gifted and talented programs? Check.
- Bilingual – whoops, excuse me, multilingual education? Check.
- Anti-drinking and anti-drug programs? Check.
- Mandatory reporting to child-welfare bureaucracies? Check.
- After-school day-care services? Check.
I’m certain the above list is incomplete.
The high-level strategy is simple:
Then make sure, by the time-honored methods of the Left, that those teaching and supervising the kids are Leftists. Then, by steadily raising the tax exaction for “public education,” render the great majority of American families unable to afford any of the alternatives.
Today, public-school “sex education” is being used to indoctrinate impressionable pubescents in the acceptability – nay, the glamor — of homosexuality and transgenderism. This, at a phase of life when the kids’ glands are in the driver’s seat, such that they can hardly keep their minds on anything else.
Victoria Taft writes:
One doesn’t have to teach the intricacies of gay sex — and why is it always gay, not straight, porn that activists are trying to get into schools, anyway?— to convey the idea that we treat all persons with kindness. Since government schools began in the United States, we got along just fine without porn in the libraries, unless National Geographic counts. What’s magical about this moment that requires us to supply libraries with gay porn now?
“What’s magical” is that the Left has disposed of all attempts at concealment. It is celebrating its triumph, confident that no effective opposition to it is possible. And it is correct.
Keep your kids out of the public schools, no matter what you must sacrifice to do so.
UPDATE: Have a little fresh evidence.
You don’t really need to find out what’s going on
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone
[Don Henley]
Dec 21 2023
How Much Worse Could It Get?
In reflecting on the piece below, it struck me that today’s federal government has become so thoroughly corrupt – so anti-American — that I’d be hard pressed to name a government anywhere or anywhen that compares unfavorably to it. And as usual when I’m only half awake, that started a fresh train of half-facetious thought.
Many years ago, William F. Buckley stated pungently that he’d rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. He, too, was probably being a bit facetious, but it’s still an approach that deserves some thought. What if the elections that currently populate the two Houses of Congress were scrapped in favor of the following biennial procedure:
- On “Selection Day,” tokens representing all the zip codes in the United States are put into a Bingo-style randomizing drum.
- The drum is spun briskly, and – under the watchful attention of an auditor from Price Waterhouse, of course – a zip code is selected.
- The names of all the persons in that zip code who are Constitutionally eligible to occupy seats in the House of Representatives are put into the drum.
- The drum is once again spun briskly, and 435 names are selected. These become our Representatives for the two years to come.
- The zip code tokens are returned to the drum, it’s spun once again, and a second zip code is selected.
- The names of all the persons in that zip code who are Constitutionally eligible to occupy seats in the Senate are put into the drum.
- Yet another spin, and 100 names are selected. These become our Senators for the two years to come.
Do you think it would work any better or worse than our current system of selling Congressional offices to the highest bidder?
Dec 21 2023
Embarrassing For The GOP
It’s not that long ago that a revolt against then Speaker-Of-The-House Kevin McCarthy, led by Matt Gaetz, barely succeeded in ousting McCarthy from that post. The vote to expel garnered the support of the Democrat caucus, plus a paltry five Republicans’ votes. What I didn’t know at the time was that some highly prominent Democrats wanted McCarthy to remain Speaker. One such is depicted below:
That so odious a figure as that wanted McCarthy to remain Speaker should have told the GOP something. It, and the vote to expel that removed McCarthy, certainly told us the hoi polloi something: namely, that the Republican Party no longer differs from the Democrat Party in anything but name.
Do you call yourself a Republican? Do you send the GOP money now and then? The above is what you’ve been supporting. Please stop.
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