May 22 2025

No Title Would Suffice Part 2: “Ambush!”

     The media have received the DNC’s post-Ramaphosa talking points, including the Word of the Day:

     Applause to Andrea Shea King!

May 22 2025

No Title Would Suffice

     No doubt you’ve heard about this:

     Our Gentle Readers are already aware, from innumerable reports over the past three decades, that South African Negroes, having attained political supremacy there, are allowing their murderous elements to rampage unchecked among Afrikaner whites, especially the exceptionally vulnerable Afrikaner farmers. It seems President Cyril Ramaphosa came to the United States to “debunk” all those reports. President Trump didn’t let him get away with it, as the video above makes clear.

     The media, it seems, were desperate to deflect from the evidence of the genocide of Afrikaner whites:

     One “reporter,” NBC News’s Peter Alexander, didn’t want to talk about that at all. He wanted to discuss the Qatari 747 that’s being loaned to the Department of Defense as a temporary Air Force One:

     President Trump called NBC News White House reporter Peter Alexander “a disgrace” and a “terrible reporter” after he asked about the plane the U.S. has accepted from Qatar to be the next Air Force One.
     Mr. Trump was talking at the White House alongside South African President Cyril Ramaphosa about the U.S. president’s claims that South Africa’s Afrikaner community is facing a “genocide.” Mr. Ramaphosa has strongly denied the claim.
     Mr. Trump had just finished showing a video that he said proves his claims about the treatment of the White Afrikaner farmers when he opened up the discussion for reporters to ask questions. Mr. Alexander posed a question about the Qatari jet.
     “They’re giving the United States a jet, OK? And it’s a great thing. We’re talking about other things. NBC trying to get off the subject of what he just saw,” Mr. Trump said, raising his voice.

     That exchange occurred immediately after President Trump had just aired videos establishing the genocide Ramaphosa was so anxious to deny. I could not have imagined a better demonstration of what the Legacy Media are all about.

     Let a white cop shoot a black criminal and the media immediately rush to the scene to cover the wailings from the criminal’s family, always with the tint of “police racism.” Let a black government attempt to conceal a literal genocide against white farmers, and the gentlemen of the press would prefer to talk about anything else. Rather large weather we’ve been having, eh, hombre?

     No, we don’t hate the media enough. It might not be possible.

May 22 2025

Dust, Ashes, And Excrement

     An interesting snippet from Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed came to mind just a moment ago:

     “All right, maybe, but our society, here, is a true community wherever it truly embodies Odo’s ideas. It was a woman who made the Promise! What are you doing—indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?” The word he used was not “wallowing,” there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally “coating continually and thickly with excrement.”

     (I did a quick search of the site to see if “wallowing” has been used here before this. WordPress informs me that it has been used 16 times in the text of a previous piece. Well, now it’s 17. “Excrement,” however, is brand new to Liberty’s Torch. You can make of that what you will.)

     That’s not a very pretty mental image, to be sure, but I find it strangely relevant to the current behavior of left-inclined reporters and commentators over the “revelations” that Joe Biden’s had the cognitive capacity of a rutabaga for some time now. If you need a few citations, Ace provides some here, and still more here. These past few days such “revelations” have been everywhere, so I’ll let those suffice.

     I was also put in mind of the old Hebrew custom of displaying grief and remorse by sitting on a public curb pouring dust and ashes over one’s own head. (My beloved wife informs me that “we don’t do that anymore,” so finding video examples would be difficult at best.) It was intended to demonstrate the sincerity of one’s regrets, among other things. Keep that image in mind as well.

     The salient point here isn’t any “grief and remorse” on the part of those left-inclined reporters and commentators. They don’t feel any. Being mercenaries with bylines whose reputation for credibility is their main stock in trade, it’s alien to their natures to admit to any kind of error. (They’re intellectually and morally superior, remember?) They want the responsibility for the deceptions we’ve suffered to fall on other shoulders: mainly Biden’s intimates.

     The names most prominent in castigations of the Biden “deception” have been White House chief of staff Ron Klain, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “first son” Hunter Biden, and of course “Dr.” Jill Biden. There are others, of course, but those have received the greatest share of the dust, ashes, and excrement. In contrast, virtually the whole Legacy Media press corps is effusive in self-exculpation: “We were deceived too! We’re just as much victims as you of the Great Unwashed!”

     Yeah, sure, and Biden won the 2020 presidential election fair and square, too.

     Remember this episode? Not enough Americans reflected on it at the time. The Legacy Media treated the Clinton for President campaign as gospel truth, inherently trustworthy. What Donald Trump or any of his staffers said was treated as dubious at best, inherently untrustworthy. “Investigate? Track down unaffiliated sources and seek confirmations? We don’t do that, you uppity member of the hoi polloi. Sit down, shut up, and take what we give you.”

     Even when America was a high-trust society, the barons of the media had agendas more important to them than reporting the “news.” Were they as politically one-sided in previous eras as they are today? Unclear. But what is clear is that even when their “mistakes” are exposed, they won’t accept any blame for them. They certainly won’t admit to having confirmed the statements of politicians and handlers without probing deeper: i.e., to not having done their jobs.

     “The media aren’t upset because they saw how far gone Joe is. They’re upset because you saw it.” – Ragin’ Dave

May 21 2025

Looking Ahead

     Just now, things are going pretty well at the federal level. Yes, they could be better – when in American history has that not been the case? – but the Trump II Administration is certainly an improvement on both Trump I and the Biden Interregnum. In particular, there’s been a marked increase in both Democrat hysteria and Republican plain speaking. The exchange between Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a good example:

     Quoth PJ Media’s Sarah Anderson:

     Of course, Van Hollen didn’t like that. “That’s just a flippant statement,” he said. But then things got even more heated.
     Van Hollen didn’t want Rubio to have a chance to respond and complained to Risch that he hadn’t actually asked any questions. Risch wasn’t having it. He told Van Hollen that Rubio was allowed to respond and reprimanded him for essentially wasting his time. “Your remarks do not represent the view of this committee,” Risch said to Van Hollen.
     “I chose to use my time that way, Mr. Chairman. That’s my right to use my time that way,” Van Hollen said.
     Rubio then started responding to Van Hollen’s accusations, but the senator from Maryland would not shut up. He started carrying on about how Rubio should “take his testimony to the federal court of the United States.”

     Now, this matter of it being Van Hollen’s “right to use my time that way” – i.e., berating a Cabinet appointee in a scurrilous fashion and deliberately denying him the chance to respond – strikes me as a balance of opposites. On the one hand, it does seem both unfair and unkind, even if Senate rules don’t explicitly prohibit it. On the other hand, could there be a better demonstration of political malice than what Van Hollen did? Isn’t the Administration’s position strengthened by the contrast between the spittle-flecked Van Hollen and the composed and confident Rubio?

     Van Hollen is typical of today’s Democrats. He has nothing substantive to talk about. Democrat talking points avail him not. He’s going for outrage against the Administration… but how much outrage can anyone, however rhetorically adroit, whip up against an Administration policy that’s both entirely legitimate and favored by the overwhelming majority of Americans?

     If someone with a camera and a microphone were to corner Van Hollen and ask him point-blank, “Do you oppose the deportation of criminal illegal aliens?” he’d have no cogent response. He’d have to bluster his way around it. If he were unable to circumnavigate that reef, he’d be forced to admit that he’s against the Administration’s policies because it’s a Republican Administration. That’s Democrat politics in the Year of Our Lord 2025.

     Someone observed recently that when a Democrat condemns an Administration initiative by saying “but it shouldn’t be done that way” – i.e., how a Democrat who doesn’t want to foam at the mouth in public retreats from a confrontational inquiry – he seldom has to specify exactly how “it should be done.” Reporters, the overwhelming majority of whom are Democrat partisans, are loath to press them. They understand the game being played: the Democrats must characterize the Republicans as either stupid or evil. If the public agrees with the Republicans on policy, the Democrats must condemn them on procedure. To insist on specifics would cross-cut the Democrats’ tactically, and is therefore disallowed.

     Perhaps Senate procedures for these committee hearings should be amended, specifically to permit the interviewed Cabinet appointees to cross-question the committee members. I know, I know: the Senate would never agree to it. Still, it’s pleasant to imagine.

     A few more Democrat performances like Van Hollen’s and the GOP will be all set for the 2026 midterms. We’ll soon see whether the Republican talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is present and voting.

May 21 2025

A Blockbuster

     In pursuit of the documentation so long sought about the “Russiagate” scandal, Sundance at The Last Refuge has produced a stunning piece that trails from the 2008 campaign for President all the way to today. I can’t usefully excerpt this piece. Let it suffice to say that after you’ve read it, your view of national politics will never be the same. Go forth!

May 21 2025

Occupational Hazards Dept.

     Every trade has its peculiar hazards. Priests agonize over confidences. Engineers become obsessed with perfection. Lawyers argue about everything. Writers read obsessively, ever anxious that someone’s “been there before them.” Accountants – no! Sweetie! Put down that cleaver! Anyway, he who chooses some occupation should be aware of its specific dangers before he decides to enter it.

     Some jobs’ particular risks are what keep many people from pursuing them. The physical risks associated with urban construction, for example, are considerable. So are those that come with the trades plied upon the ocean. And of course, soldiers must be aware that someone just might shoot them.

     Time was, journalists – back when they were called reporters, that is – were poisoned by the tools of their trade. To combat the effects, they turned to drink:

     Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horse-whippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was like to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve, and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end – it was simply a fact of life that operated less slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not.

     [Algis Budrys, Michaelmas]

     Well, the days of “hot metal” typesetting are pretty much over, thank God. But after a century or so, the practice of drinking oneself into a stupor seems to have been traditionalized by repetition. An article from Business Insider suggests that, anyway:

     The results showed that journalists’ brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.
     Forty-one percent of the subjects said they drank 18 or more units of alcohol a week, which is four units above the recommended weekly allowance. Less than 5% drank the recommended amount of water.
     However, in interviews conducted in conjunction with the brain profile results, the participants indicated they felt their jobs had a lot of meaning and purpose, and they showed high mental resilience. Swart suggested this gave them an advantage over people in other professions in dealing with the work pressure of tight deadlines.

     I’ve never been a journalist – no, blogging doesn’t count – and I’ve only known one such person. Yes, he drank heavily. Indeed, he seemed unaware of how much hard liquor he consumed. If the occupation leads inexorably to this, how many of those who seek to become journalists are aware of it before they sign up for it?

     Occupational alcoholism isn’t quite as threatening as the prospect of being shot during a war, or going overboard in the middle of the Atlantic. Still, it’s something most of us would prefer to avoid. Given the low esteem of journalists at this time, I find myself wondering how the attractions of that trade can be strong enough to lure a young man, despite the threat of alcoholism. And should a young journalist, striving to rise through the trade, become known as a teetotaler, would that impede his prospects? Would his colleagues shut him out as “not one of us?”

     If you refuse to practice the vices of the business you’ve chosen, does that count against you with your peers? How about with your employer?

May 20 2025

Day Off

     Apologies, Gentle Reader. I’m in a state of “too much to do and not enough of me” once again. And believe it or not – persons with delicate palates prefer not, but we needn’t belabor the point – much of the to-do list involves cooking! I have to get on it right away if I’m going to finish by the appointed hour. So no screed today.

     (What was that about retirement giving you back control of your time? Geez, you let people know that you can turn out a decent meatball and look what happens! But I do like being appreciated for something other than my stunning good looks and giant… oh, never mind. Have a nice day.)

May 19 2025

They knew

As our gracious host has already mentioned, Drooling Joe the Chinese Hand Puppet has cancer. Prostate cancer. And it has metastasized to his bones.

As it just so happens, my father died of prostate cancer, thanks in great part to the Covidiacy that shut down hospitals and essentially sent my father into kidney failure as doctors refused to treat anything or anyone in the ER. And yes, it metastasized into his bones. But only after YEARS.

Prostate cancer is one of the slowest, if not THE slowest form of cancer. My father was first diagnosed sometime around 2013-2014. He passed away from the disease in 2023.

Drooling Joe the Chinese hand puppet and his puppet masters likely knew about the cancer a looooooooong time ago. Perhaps even prior to 2020. His puppet masters knew he wasn’t going to last a second term. Hell, with his dementia, there was no guarantee he was going to last a first term. Hence, Kamala. The Klueless Klown of Kommifornia. You have one hand puppet from age and senility, and another hand puppet from witlessness and ego. I can’t wait to see who Obama picks next.

I am now in the habit of assuming that every enemy action coming from the satanic pit of D.C. is being done deliberately. It could be possible that all those people are just stupid and lazy, but the evidence staring me in the face says otherwise.

May 19 2025

Miracle Required

     “Don’t believe in miracles – rely on them.” – Originator Unknown

     Sometimes, there’s no temporal answer. Sometimes, mortal power is unequal to the task. When the problem is rooted in open, widespread, unconcealed malice, and its severity threatens the very existence of the Republic, all that’s left is prayer.

     I’m neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. I’m just a retired engineer who can’t help thinking and writing about what he thinks. What you see here at Liberty’s Torch are the consequences… well, at least the ones not too outrageous to put on the Web. So take everything you find here – every pondering, every theory, every suggestion or conclusion – with the proverbial grain of salt. Having said that, we proceed.

     America has been afflicted with rampant evil.

     I set that off as its own baby paragraph to give you, Gentle Reader, pause for a little thought. Something that’s rampant is therefore common; it must be visible in our environment. So I’ve deliberately set you a task: to see the evil around you.

     That’s where and how we must begin.

     “You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?” – Douglas Adams

     The above is a little early comic relief for what will surely be a depressing subject. It’s somewhat unfair to launch into a subject such as this one on a Monday morning without a leavening of levity. But then, considering the subject, it’s possible that no time nor day of the week is any more suitable.

     The Two Great Commandments express God’s will for Man more clearly and concisely than any other statement known to history:

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

     [Matthew 22:34-40]

     The perfect clarity of those Commandments is what we’d expect from the Son of God. Contrast them with evil. Is the opposition between them at all vague?

     Our self-love is expressed in several ways, at several levels. With the exception of some mentally disturbed “self-harmers,” our nature commands us to preserve our bodies intact and healthy. If we are commanded to love others as we love ourselves, we are forbidden to wish harm upon them. It could not be simpler.

     From here, let’s turn to a bit of recent news:

     WASHINGTON—Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer just months after he left office, his representatives said Sunday.
     Biden received the diagnosis of prostate cancer with metastasis to the bone after he was experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. “While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management. The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians,” according to a statement from Biden’s personal office.
     The diagnosis arrives as Biden, who was 82 when he left office in January, has come under scrutiny for age-related mental and physical declines he suffered while he was president.

     Find me anyone who would regard being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer as good news. Clearly, it would be evil to wish it on someone. It would be equally evil to hope that the sufferer would suffer greatly from it. Even if we were indifferent to the sufferer, we presumably non-evil persons would only wish him well.

     Scott Pinsker notes the reaction from the White House:

     Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.

     President Trump’s comments were perfect. Cancer is serious. Showing compassionate to an ailing adversary doesn’t make you look weak — it shows you have a soul.
     But it does beckon a very interesting question: How would the Democrats have reacted if Trump had announced that he has cancer?
     With compassion?
     Or would they be putting on their dancing shoes, hoping to do the dosey doe on his grave?
     Actually, we don’t have to wonder. President Trump has (knock on wood) enjoyed splendid health for most of his life, but in 2020, he was briefly hospitalized with COVID.
     Do you remember what happened?
     Liberals responded with so much venom — and there were so many people clamoring for Trump’s death — that Facebook, Twitter (now X), and TikTok ALL had to remind users that wishing Trump would drop dead of COVID was a violation of its rules!

     I say the Left’s desires and statements, as Pinsker recalls them above, are evil. Change my mind if you can.

     There’s some history on this. My lumber-room memory has cast up a few statements Democrats and Leftists made about Clarence Thomas:

     Testifying against Justice Thomas’s confirmation in 1991, Rep. Major Owens likened him to Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian military officer who collaborated with the Nazis. On PBS in 1994, the political commentator Julianne Malveaux remarked: “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease.” – From the Wall Street Journal.

     Ann Coulter compiled many more such left-wing expressions of ill-will toward Republicans and conservatives. As I doubt she’d approve of my typing in the whole of her book, let the above represent the rest. So the syndrome has been around for a while.

     And it is evil.

     I could go on. I could enumerate all the lies, the savage and substanceless denunciations, and the scurrilities committed by Leftists in their attempts to silence figures in the Right. I could talk about the assassination attempts on President Trump, and the earlier one by James Hodgkinson that nearly took the life of Congressman Steve Scalise. But life has been both strenuous and expensive lately, and I have a great deal to do today, so I’ll cut to the chase.

     The political Left, suffused with an unshakable conviction that it is both intellectually and morally superior to those who disagree with it, has embraced evil. It freely and openly wishes harm on its political adversaries. There is no imaginable moral defense of such behavior, even when it’s confined to words.

     As their convictions, both about themselves and others, were not acquired through a reasoning process, they cannot be argued out of them. As it would be evil for us to wish harm on them, the very most we can do is chide them… and pray for a miracle. The required miracle would consist of a sudden and overpowering moral enlightenment akin to satori, that sweeps over them like a benevolent tidal wave. Producing such a wave of enlightenment lies outside our power. We must trust to God.

     I hope He has some time free in His schedule.

May 18 2025

What Failed, The State Or The People?

     Two pieces of interest:

     …speak of failure, albeit from markedly different perspectives. Let’s start with the Sido piece:

     We see the signs all around us, signs of a society that has stopped functioning. Momentum is carrying us forward but each day something that was working stops working. When the momentum stops, the animals will be let loose in earnest.
     The United States, like most Western nations, is a failed state shambling forward from inertia. It isn’t something that can be fixed, all we can do right now is survive and prepare to rebuild.

     Being a stickler for clarity and the precise use of words, I’d take issue with the phrase failed state in the above. By what standard did the American State fail? The Founding Fathers had certain intentions for the American State, and it has indeed failed those. However, it has operated as States have done throughout history: to enlarge itself and gather ever more power, at the expense of the freedom and property of its subjects. Moreover, it continues in existence, doing what States do and fulfilling the agenda built into all States.

     Nevertheless, there’s a failure involved. The locus of that failure remains to be accurately specified. For that we turn to T. L. Davis:

     There is the saying: “no one is coming to save you.” One should take that to heart. The only way any of this gets sorted out is to put the power rightfully back into the hands of the people themselves. That does not come with a certificate of concession from the government, it must be ripped from their grubby fingers by brutal force. They own the media, so whoever endeavors toward freedom must face being called every name in the book and a few that are made up on the spot.

     So! Do we have a failed state before us, or a failed people?

     I don’t think this subject requires much explication or elaboration. T. L. Davis is quite correct: only citizen action can reclaim our heritage of freedom. We permitted freedom of expression, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to our justly acquired property, and the rest of our rights to be taken from us through gradualism. We watched as the guarantees in our founding documents were shredded. Small slices, each one rationalized as “for the greater good,” persuaded us to sit still. But time and power-lust enlarged and multiplied those slices. Americans no longer have inalienable rights. We have been led to a point where, as C. S. Lewis observed of England three-quarters of a century ago, “a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.”

     No doubt that yoke was fastened upon the people of England “for the greater good,” too.

     I no longer have much hope for an American renaissance in the near future. I’m happy to see the Trump Administration doing what it’s doing, but even President Trump, the ultimate outsider, isn’t radical enough to do everything that must be done. Indeed, if he were, his own party would see him impeached, convicted, and run out of Washington in ignominy.

     There is no salvation in politics, regardless of party platform or affiliation.

     To return to my original point, even the Founders’ Constitutional design could not withstand the relentless power of power-lust. States are the ultimate instruments of power. Evil men will always gravitate toward them. The results are dictated by the dynamic of power. Friedrich Hayek delineated it ably in The Road to Serfdom, specifically the chapter titled “Why The Worst Get On Top.”

     Failed state or failed people, behind it all lies a failed concept: that it is right and proper for some to rule others. Our forebears accepted that concept because “it’s always been that way.” Yet it hasn’t always been that way. It need not be so in the future.

     I had a dream, once. I wrote a novel about it. My readers clamored for more. So I wrote two others, but not to elaborate on the dream. Rather, in them I wrote about the kind of process that would shatter that dream. Yet the Spoonerites’ descendants knew freedom, for a while.

     What will our progeny know?

May 18 2025

Vaccines, Placebo Testing, And Litigation

     The following graphic captures the current indignation over the absence of placebo testing from vaccine-approval regimens:

     For those who aren’t aware, though I doubt there are many, placebo testing is a form of double-blind testing in which a control group receives a placebo instead of the drug being tested. It’s commonplace in the testing of ameliorative drugs: i.e., drugs intended to improve an existing condition. Preventative drugs such as vaccines pose a more complex problem. That problem rests on two pillars: the efficacy of the drug and the length of the test interval.

     If the vaccine were ineffective, the members of the control group and the members of the group that received the vaccine (hence to be called the active group) would contract the disease against which the vaccine was developed at roughly equal rates. No issue of litigation would arise. But if the vaccine were effective, the active group would receive protection from the disease, while the control group would not. Let a few years go by: would the members of the control group who caught the disease have a case against the designers of the test?

     In an increasingly litigious society, the question is serious. Pharma companies know it.

     The length of the test interval also comes into play. Some very serious diseases occur so infrequently that a test of years – possibly decades – would be required to amass statistically significant evidence of vaccine hazards and efficacy. Once again, lawyers would not balk at accusing vaccine makers of causing serious diseases in vaccinated persons, even if the incidence of such diseases is statistically so low that causation is inherently indeterminate. Short test intervals would be particularly vulnerable to challenge on that basis… yet long test intervals, over which time the vaccine is not available to persons outside the test groups, would expose the makers to litigation as well, especially if the vaccine were ultimately judged effective. Non-recipients could sue for having been denied protection owing to the vaccine’s “proven” efficacy!

     So there are problems involved in placebo testing of vaccines. They’re probably soluble, with well-drawn laws and test-volunteer agreements, but they should not be dismissed as inconsequential.

May 17 2025

MoveOn, 2025 Edition

     Apparently, the Democrats are reviving this old tactic from the Bill Clinton years:

     Is comment required?

May 17 2025

Criminals As Agents of Statists and Congress’ Failure to Declare War

Forgive me Co-conspirators and Gentle Readers, but I’m about to make a very short set of observations. The pain of my conscience for a short time exceeds that of my body.

I’ve lost track how long I recognized and argued that every increasingly liberal treatment of criminals serves to benefit politicians who recognize that subsequent increases in crime benefit those who will gain more power as the dangers to the public consequently increase. I first made the connection over thirty years ago with arguments favoring the death penalty that were so persuasive at Prodigy* that my opponents got me banned.

I lack the enegry to build this up properly. So here is the core of the point I hope will prime the pump to build arguments that our Congress-critters need to fear too much to ignore.

How can Congress continue to let this Venezuelan gang get protection from our SCOTUS? Isn’t it plain as day that that communist country released its criminals so they could invade US? Isn’t that an act of war?

Why aren’t we screaming at Congress to declare war in kind? Once declared, SCOTUS dare not then continue to ignore the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

How many in Congress have taken campaign funds that have some connection to Venezuela? How many in Congress appear to favor criminal alien rights over citizen rights to live freely? Are those members of congress also the same ones who favor liberalized criminal penalties and prosecutions? As I have argued –and so should many other patriots — so called liberal policies serve to increase the size of government which, in practice, reduces citizen freedom. Hence, statists love criminals.

Even criminals who’ve been allowed to invade us without any process, but now those same “liberal” forces are insisting those invaders NOW get due process.

Just how many members of Congress have been and are committing treason?

May 17 2025

Which Side Are You On, Boys?

     Here’s a quick jaunt down Memory Lane from the 2016 presidential campaign:

Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day.
Pelley: Well, she had pneumonia. I mean—
Cernovich: How do you know? Who told you that?
Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.
Cernovich: Why would you trust the campaign?
Pelley: The point is you didn’t talk to anybody who’d ever examined Hillary Clinton.
Cernovich: I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton is gonna say at all as true. I’m not gonna take her on her word. The media says we’re not gonna take Donald Trump on his word. And that’s why we are in these different universes.

     The Buzzfeed story commits the exact same sin that Mike Cernovich so neatly exposed in the above snippet: It took statements from the Clinton for President campaign as unquestionably true a priori. Yet it didn’t grant that same state of grace to the Trump for President campaign; rather, it persisted in characterizing Trump as a liar even when objective evidence plainly spoke otherwise. Why?

     This is especially important in light of mainstream media figures’ attempts to: 1) make a buck off the “revelations” of Joe Biden’s mental deterioration, and: 2) pretend that the fault lies entirely with Biden’s handlers in the White House and the Democrat Party, rather than with the media’s non-performance of its journalistic duties.

     It’s not flatly impossible that a few media figures were sincerely deceived. But it is impossible to deny the media’s double standard: its decision to trust the Democrats without verification, while simultaneously distrusting the Republicans even in the face of objective evidence. It’s that double standard that most severely damns them.

     I can’t imagine a starker giveaway of partisan alignment.

     In fact, it is precisely the role of the news media to notice things that public officials try to hide, so as to keep citizens apprised of what is really going on. And that is exactly what the news media intentionally declined to do during the four years of “Joe Biden.” — James Kunstler

May 17 2025

Emotions Of A Different Kind

     Shamelessly stolen from Weird Dave at AoSHQ:

     I’ve felt a great deal of both monachopsis and liberosis in my time. What about you, Gentle Reader?

May 17 2025

Women, Children, And Natural Law

     Natural laws baffle quite a lot of people. They’re not in the lawbooks. They don’t have a legislature’s seal of approval. The police don’t arrest offenders and the district attorneys don’t prosecute them. Yet they exist. They sneer at those who sneer at them, for they are un-repealable, um-modifiable, and self-enforcing.

     Here’s one that’s been violated quite a lot lately:

Species that fail to protect their children and childbearing members are headed for extinction.

     How many functioning brain cells does it take to recognize that? Yet a great part of the First World appears determined to ignore it. Consider this story, from five years ago:

     A man who raped an 11-year-old girl in Germany was released from custody after 12 days and then went on to rape a 13-year-old just five weeks later, it is alleged.
     The Afghan migrant’s alleged sex crimes have caused outrage in Germany where politicians are calling for his deportation if he is found guilty.
     The 23-year-old, named as Zubyr S., was first arrested in June but released less than two weeks later after authorities claimed there was no evidence he was likely to re-offend.

     The “man” – an Afghan national in Germany — raped a child. Rape is one of the most heinous of all crimes. At one time, it was punishable by death virtually everywhere in the First World. And to rape a child? Monstrous. Yet he was set free because “authorities claimed there was no evidence he was likely to re-offend.”

     What? Isn’t one child rape bad enough to do something with the miscreant? He has to do it twice?

     Allow me to post something you may have seen before. I think it will serve to express my incredulity and fury better than rambling on for hundreds of words more.

     I’ll be back later, I hope.

May 16 2025

You cannot hate the media enough

That 747 that Qatar is “giving” to Trump? Discussions to purchase that plane were started under the Biden administration.

“What no one’s talking to you about,” Mullin revealed, “is this same 747 has been in negotiations for a year. The Biden administration is the one that started these conversations. It didn’t start under the Trump administration. Why? Because we need a backup for Air Force 1. Because right now, the president of the United States is flying around on a 40-year-old plane, and there is no backup for it. The backup we had, the airframe started having structural issues.”

The media does nothing but spew DNC propaganda and lies in their attempt to destroy Donald Trump. I see news headlines from MSLSD and other propaganda outlets when I’m at work, and they bear zero commonalities with reality. They really do live in their own bubble of bullshit, and anyone who relies on them for information is going to be ignorant of what is actually going on in the world.

Every time I see a news article from one of the “mainstream” outlets, my desire for all those people to die a screaming death increases.

May 16 2025

The Ultimate Implication Of “Equity”

     I know this has been much discussed in the Blogosphere these past few days. Yet it remains unaddressed in the most important of all contexts: that of public policy.

     It’s public policy in black-ruled South Africa that the government may take land from white farmers without compensation. Granted, that only formalizes what black gangs have been doing to white South African farmers for some time now. Still, it forces us to confront what government does to “remedy disparities” in a peculiarly harsh light.

     What most interesting to me is the African National Congress’s (ANC) response to President Trump’s invitation to those white farmers:

     The African National Congress (ANC) on Tuesday rebuffed the US’s decision to grant refugee status to individuals that the party says “self-identify” as Afrikaners, describing them as “instigators of a falsehood” and in search of impunity from transformation, not safety.
     “…they flee not from persecution, but from justice, equality and accountability for historic privilege,” said ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri.
     […]
     She noted that the misuse of refugee protections to shield right-wing, anti-transformation elements was a violation of the spirit and letter of international law.

     Ponder that for a moment. This… person isn’t satisfied with simply grabbing white farmers’ land; she wants them to stick around for “transformation.” And she’s exercised that, by granting them refugee status in the United States, President Trump has protected them against said “transformation!”

     Has anyone asked this black thug “Exactly what do you mean by that?” She wouldn’t dare to answer plainly. She, and the party for which she speaks, doesn’t just want that carefully developed and husbanded farmland; they want to rape, torture, and slaughter the whites who’ve cared for it. No other conclusion is consistent with the huge rallies that feature chants of “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.”

     There is no alternate terminus for a public policy that says “We’re going to take what you have and – maybe – give it to someone else who deserves it more.” It will always eventuate in terror and slaughter, just as it has in South Africa since the onset of black rule. But soft! The United States isn’t black-ruled… yet. Why, then, is our Congress entertaining demands for “reparations for slavery?” Is there even one sitting legislator who would say out loud that paying “descendants of slaves” from the pockets of persons who’ve never owned slaves, and in the overwhelming majority of cases have no ancestors who owned slaves, is required by the principles of justice?

     The attitude displayed by this black thug is identical to that of “ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri.” It simply hasn’t yet been expressed where American whites can hear.

May 16 2025

For Euthanasia Boosters

     As it’s a key initiative of the death cults, I’m firmly against legalizing “assisted suicide” in all its variants. Read this X thread and come to some other conclusion.

     Life is a gift. You don’t earn it; it’s given to you. You may dismiss the notion that there’s a Giver to whom you owe a little gratitude; I don’t care. But even if you put little or no value on that gift, do not encourage the would-be murderers of others, no matter how “high-minded” you deem them to be. Life is not a mathematical problem, where one can morally and deliberately sacrifice someone else’s life for others’ benefit.

     “It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.” – Stephen King, The Green Mile

May 16 2025

Quote Of The Day

     This one comes from a beloved and unusually reliable source:

     Unfortunately, the idea of the Great White Father died out with European colonialism. If the mightiest empires in the world could spend decades imposing Western values, the rule of law, modern medicine, engineering and farming techniques on these countries only to have them — immediately, the moment the imperial power leaves — erupt into bloody, violent, corrupt, cannibalistic dystopias, then bringing them here to collect welfare probably isn’t going to help either.

     Ann Coulter doesn’t mince words.

     A great deal of deliberate denial has gone into this subject. For at last half a century, no one with a public platform has been willing to address the glaring disparity between First World nations and those that are run by blacks. Yet at one time it was recognized as a racial problem, rather than something explainable without reference to the races involved.

     The mock-horror of the bien-pensants has given rise to a situation in which “Racist!” has become the ultimate denunciation. Yet the evidence has been clear since Kipling’s time. But he who dares to cite it, and to note the patterns that run through it, is driven out of the public sphere with a ferocity not even exercised against plague carriers. Ask John Derbyshire.

     I am a racist. That’s because I consider evidence more probative than other people’s feelings or their propensity to wishful thinking. And until the evidence changes – possible, though as our British cousins might say, not bloody likely – I will remain one.

     “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes

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