The right question to the right person at the right time can puncture a huge balloon of hypocrisy. Interestingly, a stimulus to such questions arrived only a few minutes ago.
The stimulus is a campaign fundraising email from Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. Here is what I hold to be the critical portion:
It seems Republican Leadership only does the right thing when they have a political gun to their head.
There’s been NO vote on Term Limits, NO vote on a balanced budget, NO plan to have individual appropriations bills considered, NO full release of J6 tapes, and NO spending cut to raise the Debt Limit.
They even promised there would be an impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas and that they would subpoena Hunter Biden and members of the Biden Crime Family.
Trump has been charged with 91 counts. Yet, we haven’t even subpoenaed Hunter Biden – or any Biden for that matter.
It was only when House conservatives put massive pressure on Republican Leadership to Impeach Biden that they even made any effort.
And even then, they continue to drag their feet.
Perhaps you’ve received the same email. Rather than ask you what question or questions have occurred to you, I’ll simply give you mine:
Concerning term limits, a balanced budget, individual appropriations bills, and the rest: have you submitted any bills on these subjects for Congress’s consideration? If so, in which session of Congress did you submit them?
Inasmuch as a few years ago, the GOP did have majorities in both Houses of Congress and a Republican President, why were there no votes on those subjects at that time?
Who in Congress has the authority to issue subpoenas?
What are you personally doing to change the House leadership or its attitude?
What would you say, Gentle Reader, are the odds of getting straight, completely non-evasive, entirely on-topic answers to those questions, whether from Congressman Gaetz or from any other sitting Republican legislator?
Don’t be fooled into sending these…people your hard-earned money. There is no hope for the Republic in the “Republican” Party. It’s a sham. There is only one party: the Establishment Party. All else is pabulum for the credulous.
The first two graphics speak softly but firmly. The third one speaks in a voice of thunder.
Way back when, the New Left had a mantra: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Reflect on what you see and hear, here and elsewhere, and decide for yourself: which are you?
First off, can we all just laugh at this sanctimonious bag of egomaniacal bullshit?
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel has canceled his upcoming live Strike Force Three show after contracting Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
I would say that it couldn’t happen to a more deserving piece of shit, but we all know people who deserve what’s happening to Kimmel multiple times over. Anyways, the clot-shot doesn’t work, it was never going to work, and the people who pushed it from the top knew those facts. Jimmy Kimmel is just one of the self-absorbed low-IQ morons who regurgitated the bullshit because all the right people told him to do so.
You know what else doesn’t work? Flu shots. Here’s Part One and here’s Part Two from Nurse Clair. Skip on over and read. The posts aren’t particularly long, but if you start going into the weeds you could be there for a while. For the TL/DR crowd, flu shots don’t work, their efficacy has been wildly overblown, and some of the shots aren’t really all that good for you. Unless you like having a form of mercury injected into your muscles, which I’ve been informed by actual scientists that mercury exposure is a bad thing as it’s a rather toxic metal.
However, I knew the flu shots were bullshit long before I was able to explain WHY they were bullshit. The bottom line is that I’ve never been as sick with the flu as when I was forced to get a flu shot. That happened when I worked at the hospital, and when I was in the Army. Although there was a period of about eight years when I managed to skip the flu shot, until the Army medical system flagged me and once again I was back to getting poked. Guess how many times I caught the flu when I avoided the flu shot?
That’s right, zero.
Guess how often I caught the flu once I was forced to get a flu shot?
That’s right, every damn year.
What’s more, I brought this up to the medical staff when I was being lectured about the flu shot. I pointed out that every time I got the shot, I would be sick about a week later. They give me the shot, I get the flu. The nurse snapped at me: “YOU CAN’T GET SICK FROM THE FLU SHOT!” So I asked her just what the hell I was getting sick with, because it happened EVERY FUCKING TIME. Radio silence.
If you want to know where my skepticism of the medical system started, that would be a good jumping off point. Don’t tell me that the shit that’s happening to my body isn’t really happening.
And as Karl Denniger has pointed out more than once, they’ve ramped up the number of flu shots given in this country, but we haven’t seen a corresponding decrease in influenza cases. This country has gone from 20 million flu shots to over 200 million flu shots over the years, but the rate of infection doesn’t go down. If the flu shots worked, why don’t we see that decrease in influenza cases?
Anyways, I’m done getting the flu shot now, as I’m retired and any body or person who demands I get a flu shot can kiss my ass. And I would recommend that anyone else who’s pressured to get the flu shot do the same.
I actually hate feeling that I must do this, but there are far too many people turning a blind eye to what’s being done to us in the name of “diversity.” (To say nothing of “equity” or “inclusion.”)
A teacher in Flint, Michigan is knocked to the floor when a student hurls at a chair at her head. pic.twitter.com/KBOLM7KOwH
The genesis can be disputed. The origin hardly matters. This is what’s happening today. It will continue until whites put a stop to it, for it’s become entirely too clear that Negroes will not.
Does this…person belong in the United States House of Representatives? She can certainly scream and hurl irrelevancies — those are certainly vital skills for any Democrat politician — but do you think she could solve a quadratic equation?
[S]tep into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over that booth—and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system—smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers—and fathers—decline to be humiliated twice.
Do you find that to be harsh? Calling her a “Good Communist”, as in one who is no longer stealing precious oxygen from the productive members of society?
Can anyone point to one thing that Feinstein did that helped improve this country? Or did she sit in the Senate voting for constitution-destroying bill after constitution destroying bill over and over and over? You and I both know the answer to that question. She latched on to D.C. in 1992 like a tick, and she was going to finally “retire” after this term. This term of her being a feeble sock-puppet who’s aides bluntly told her ON A HOT MIC to just say “aye” on a vote because she didn’t remember what the hell was going on.
Every family destroying measure that the FedGov has passed in the last three decades had her seal of approval on it.
Every liberty-destroying bill in the last three decades had her stamp of approval on it.
Every bit of legislation that limited freedom and increased the state had her yes vote for three long decades.
I can ask God to have mercy on her soul, but I’m pretty sure at this moment she’s nowhere near God. Not even close. I could be wrong on that. I was told by a very smart man that if we make it to heaven, we’re probably going to be shocked at who else is there.
But her track record doesn’t look like a good fit.
And since Governor Hairgel of California gets to replace her, you can rest assured that no matter how contemptable Feinstein was, her replacement is going to be even worse.
It looks like a harmless word. At one time it was. It merely denoted a way of doing something, like the equally dreaded word process. And to be fair, there are times when it doesn’t stiffen my neck hair or move my hand to my sidearm. But that’s not what I have in mind this fine Friday morning.
When a surgeon-to-be is instructed in a way of freeing a patient of his savings a tumor, or a gangrenous or necrotic appendage, the method is called a procedure. Later in life, when that surgeon persuades a patient to agree to the operation, he speaks of “scheduling the procedure” and what is to come. Of course, the undertaking is intended by all to be beneficial, an improvement in the patient’s health and well-being. Yeah yeah, every now and then a surgeon will remove the wrong organ or amputate the wrong limb, but hey, they’re people, y’know? They make the occasional mistake just like the rest of us.
But that’s enough sarcasm. The procedure I have in mind this morning is of another nature. It’s malevolent in intent and maleficent in outcome. And it’s done its evil magic to many an institution already.
Sophie, an 11 year old girl, was abducted by her dad because of a “bitter custody dispute.” They were eventually found in Mexico, and police successfully reunited the girl with her mother and her mother’s new fiancé. The father is facing felony charges and will get up to 3 years in prison, if convicted.
Please go to Divemedic’s site to read the rest. I can’t excerpt it further fairly to him, nor to the subject matter. But after I delved into the matter, one element of the thing stood out rather starkly: the awesome, wholly extra-Constitutional power of the “family courts.”
The father in this contretemps, Michael Long, claims that he fled with his daughter Sophie to save her from ongoing sexual abuse by his ex-wife Kelly’s new fiancé. Sophie has several times tearfully backed up her father’s claims. While I can’t say I’ve gotten all the way to the bottom of the charge, what I’ve found suggests that the fiancé, Jacob Wayne Bellington, is not a good guy. But that deserves a lot more investigation, and a lot more disclosure by the authorities at issue. What really lit my boiler was ex-wife Kelly’s demand that the court imprison ex-husband Michael for two and a half years without a jury trial to determine his guilt or innocence.
Apparently she, at least, believed that a family court has that power. Whether or not it has such a power de jure, any ex-husband peremptorily jailed over an alimony or child support dispute will tell you: it definitely has it de facto.
And the family courts, which routinely exercise such power, are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American Left.
***
I hope you’re securely seated, Gentle Reader, because a sharp turn is coming. The next segment will be about a highly positive-looking development: the recent sharp increase in the percentage of American families that have chosen to homeschool their children. Stephen Kruiser writes:
Home schooling is a powerful arrow in the quiver of those engaged in the school choice battle. The teachers’ unions have been denigrating home schooling seemingly forever, because their continued existence relies on convincing parents that their kids don’t stand a chance in life unless they go to a public school. Even though the pandemic was a boon to most nefarious leftist plans, it was rife with unforeseen consequences for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), and their ilk.
Recent estimates put the number of families homeschooling their kids today at about 5,000,000. That’s well up from the pre-COVID numbers. Moreover, the trend hasn’t yet dry-tanked:
[T]he pandemic boom in home schooling is still booming. The results can’t be seen just yet, but this is a direct shot at the public school behemoth. In a recent VIP article, my colleague Ben Bartee asked whether public schools are “finished” because of the post-COVID popularity of home schooling. Obviously, we’re not there yet, but this is a good start.
The “educators’ unions” are apoplectic about this. As those selfsame unions were largely responsible for the protracted closure of the schools, the irony should not be lost. Yet the right to homeschool has been established by the Supreme Court as Constitutionally protected. And, as with another exceptional American characteristic – our right to keep and bear arms, which is essentially unique among the nations of the world – the unions and their boughten politicians are railing against homeschooling as a threat to everything but the price of tea and the flavor of cheese.
The Left is threatened by this trend. They’re about to unleash against it. Their weapon will be the procedure.
***
There are actually two forms of the procedure. I and others have written about the more conspicuous form:
Identify an institution with power over the bodies or minds of Americans and infiltrate it.
As the early infiltrators work their way into the institution’s hierarchy, they will strive to import other Leftists to work alongside them. This is the colonization phase.
Once a substantial colony of Leftists has been established within the institution, it will use noise, disruption, contentiousness, and other methods to increase its influence over policy decisions. This is the subversion phase.
During the subversion phase, the colony undertakes active measures to drive ideological opponents out of the institution. As this proceeds, new candidates are ever more openly screened for ideological compatibility. This is the purification phase.
Presently the institution is effectively under Leftist control. If some non-Leftists remain, they are pigeonholed and isolated from meaningful policy discussions and decisions.
That form of the procedure has successfully captured the media, the entertainment industry, and the educational institutions. It can be used to subvert any institution that must replace its members over time. It works because Leftists possess a kind of unity around their goals – to say nothing of their total lack of morals or ethics – that amplifies their effective power. Note how they’ve used it to capture such seemingly non-ideological and harmless institutions such as the World Science Fiction Convention.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing
Will sooner or later become left-wing.
Examples abound.
Homeschooling, being an activity confined to the family, is immune to that form of the procedure. But the Left has more than one arrow in its quiver. It can use already-captured institutions that wield influence over the opinions of legislators or regulators to put great pressure on families to conform to its will. Sometimes that will be coordinated with public-opinion-manipulation efforts to demonize the families it targets. If such an effort is not yet in progress, I doubt we have long to wait.
The second form of the procedure:
Identify the targeted behavior.
Make the extinction of that behavior the priority of Leftist lobbying and donating groups.
Marshal those legislators and regulators who depend financially on Leftist funds. Make consent to the priority a condition of further financial support.
Identify legislators who are ideological opponents and mount a public-relations campaign against them founded on their opposition to the priority. For best results, the campaign should appear to arise from a multiplicity of sources, such that countering any one of them will seem pointless.
Wield “grass-roots” tactics against granular targets – e.g., particular homeschooling families – that can be plausibly accused of some heinous wrongdoing. Make their supposed misbehavior synonymous with the priority.
Keep the pressure up until legislators or regulators ban or rigidly constrain the targeted behavior, whether de jure or de facto.
The synergy between the first and second forms of the procedure is evilly beautiful. Institutions and agents captured by the first form become additional weapons the Left can use in its second-form campaigns. When some of those institutions and agents wield usable power – here again, I have the family courts in mind – they can accelerate the process through the inculcation and encouragement of fear in the targeted populace.
***
I consider homeschooling to be one of the biggest threats to the Left’s program, if not the biggest of them all. The Left has depended so greatly on the subversion of the schools that without it to cement the messages from the media and the entertainment world, its whole edifice might collapse. Their fierce grip on boards of education, government departments of education, and “educators’ unions” nationwide testifies to the importance thereof. Their efforts to eliminate homeschooling throughout the Western world provide additional evidence. They’ve largely succeeded…except in America.
But the procedure is infinitely applicable, and difficult to counter. The best defense against it is radical decentralization: literally, the elimination of sizable institutions in favor of far smaller ones. As for the best methods of combatting it once it’s in action, research must continue…hopefully not by me alone.
Before I begin this screed, I’d like to express a thought that has often risen to mind but has seldom made its way through my fingers and into the sacred pixels of Liberty’s Torch:
Thank You, Gentle Readers.
Whoever and wherever you are, including those of you who read my crap to laugh at my Neanderthal sentiments. (Yes, there are some people. I could name them, but you don’t need to know who they are, and they already do.) Knowing you’re out there keeps me going. Nothing else could do it.
And now, on with the show.
***
Ann Barnhardt isn’t just a great Catholic voice in a time that desperately needs such voices. She’s also one of the clearest-eyed writers currently gracing the Web – and she says what she thinks about what she sees. Consider the following large excerpt from her column of yesterday, which I reproduce here with her permission:
Folks, I dropped out of high school largely because of this. Also the open rape threats by black guys while sitting four feet away from a teacher in study hall who had announced on the first day of school in August of ARSH 1992 that, “I’m retiring this year and I don’t give a shit about any of you. Do not talk to me. Do not bother me. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone.” He wasn’t kidding. Even hearing a six foot tall black guy threaten to rape my fifteen year old person, less than 100 pounds soaking wet, didn’t phase that POS “teacher” in the slightest. I looked at the teacher after the black guy said, “Bitch, you uptight. You need a gud f***”, locked eyes with the teacher, he looked down at his magazine, I got up and walked to the school office and said, “Draw up the withdrawal papers. I’m done. I’m never coming here again.” Punchline? The lib boomer gifted teacher, having been summoned at the news that Ann Barnhardt – as in the-one-who-was-skipped-twice Ann Barnhardt – was demanding withdrawal, looked at me, called me a “princess” and asked, “Who in the hell do you think you are?” To my eternal shame, I did NOT say, “Who do I have to be?” I said, “Well, I know I’m better than this.” Derp. Such a lost rhetorical opportunity. Anyway, I digress.
Aside from that, the fact that I hadn’t learned anything in YEARS was another huge factor. Why continue to go to a school in which nothing is taught? And WHY was nothing being taught? Because of the ITBS standardized tests – Iowa Test of Basic Skills. The Leavenworth, Kansas school district lived and died by the ITBS scores, and what the ITBS scores showed EVERY YEAR, in EVERY CLASS in EVERY SCHOOL was that the ghetto black kids were basically frozen at the first grade level. I was in Kindergarten with a ghetto black boy who was SUB-VERBAL. He could not speak. When I was in 7th grade, many of the ghetto blacks were already EXACTLY what the woman in the video above describes. While the average kids were doing one more year of arithmetic, the smart kids were in Algebra. That ghetto blacks were in what was called “consumer math”. As in, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and MAYBE fractions and decimals. And those kids did EXACTLY the same “consumer math” curriculum every year, just maybe with a different name like “Practical Math”. And they would fail. Every year. They couldn’t write, hell, they couldn’t speak except in James Brown-esque incomprehensible ebonic yelling.
[…]
But today, children across the board from ghetto blacks to affluent whites, have basically zero interaction with their parents at home, and their parents, mostly now BORN in the late ’80s through early 2000’s are themselves hopelessly uneducated and CONTRA-educated, and, like their parents are slavishly attached to “personal screens”.
I was tempted to boldface and italic far too much of the above, so I decided to let it stand. It speaks for itself. Ann gives the following diagnosis:
Destruction of the nuclear family, in particular removing fathers from households, both physically and passively. LBJ took care of the destruction of the black family first with the Great Society, but now it’s EVERYONE. What is worse, to have a totally absentee father, or some obese low-T heterosexual faggot slob laying around noshing edible marijuana and inculcating his spawn into the vidja gamer slothstyle? Discuss amongst yourselves.
Infiltration of the schools.
Glorification of the black hip-hop culture and universally instilled hatred of any intellectual life, pursuit or achievement.
Electronic devices – people literally do not SPEAK TO EACH OTHER anymore, especially parents and children. Children do not even hear adults talking amongst themselves.
CoronaScam lockdowns and masks.
That fifth entry was an accelerator rather than a primary cause, but it surely has a part to play in the drama. Convenience plus the gravitational pull of the lowest common denominator brought this about:
Greatest Generation parents, grateful to have survived the Thirties and the Second World War, overindulged their Baby Boom children.
Those children grew up to be inadequate parents who raised whiny, ignorant men.
Whiny, ignorant men have created still whinier, even more ignorant men.
Whinier and more ignorant men have created completely flaccid, totally ignorant men.
And the dynamic built into every institution in our society has decreed there’s no changing it.
Ponder that while I fetch more coffee.
***
Consider the Negro kids in Ann’s vignette of her high school experience. The school had made it a sub rosa policy to leave them exactly as predatory and ignorant as Ann depicts them – and that was more than four decades ago. It was never an openly avowed policy; it arose from the flaccidity of those who were nominally responsible for instructing them. They refused to make the effort. Why? It’s quite simple, really: under the rules that governed the school system, they didn’t need to. They’d draw their paychecks and accumulate the luxurious benefits the unions had extorted for them without having to lift a finger. So whether or not it might have been possible to civilize those young savages, there was no effort put to it.
Education? That hasn’t been the priority of “public” school employees for a long time now.
White kids, seeing what the Negro kids could get away with, began to emulate them. Emulation seldom confines itself to a single characteristic of the emulated ones. Those white kids – the ones who didn’t have a firm hand at home to curb them, and yes, there were surely some such – adopted the thuggish culture and predatory manner of the Negro kids virtually in their entirety. If it happened in Iowa and Kansas in the Eighties, you can bet the mortgage money that it had already happened just about everywhere else… and I can tell you from my personal experience that indeed it had.
Get into your time machine, go back fifty years [i.e., to 1950 — FWP], and walk the streets of any of the great cities of this continent. They were safe. They were almost perfectly clean. People didn’t jostle one another, hurl obscene imprecations at one another, deface the sides of buildings with moronic scrawling, or pollute the air with pain-threshold levels of their preferred “music.” Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection. Even the poor, of which, though they were less numerous than they are today, there was no shortage, were clean, self-reliant, self-respecting, and courteous.
The police would sort out those who couldn’t meet the prevailing standards and would unceremoniously tell them to “keep moving,” in which effort they were overwhelmingly reinforced by the non-uniformed public. If you wanted to surround yourself with degeneracy, you had to find the local Skid Row, the only place where such things were tolerated. It wasn’t a big place, and the folks you found there permitted themselves no pride about their condition. No one indulged in nonsense notions about the “dignity” of the homeless, of welfare dependents, of drug addicts, of gang members, or any of today’s mascot-groups for the coercive-compassion camp. As a result, government, which fattens on public perceptions of danger and disorder, was relatively small and unintrusive.
Were there some blemishes on this pretty picture? Yes, of course there were. There were still legal barriers against women entering the workforce in many states. There were still entailments on women’s right to hold real property in a few places in the south and southwest. A residuum of racism encumbered the black population’s efforts to raise its condition — though in fairness it must be remembered that a popular movement largely composed of white people was already afoot, and just fourteen years later it swept all race-based legal restrictions into the dustbin of history. Government had swollen due to the unconstitutional New Deal and America’s involvement in two foreign wars, and those who liked the result were working to swell it still further.
Still, in 1950, America was a place of nearly overpowering civility. In 2000…?
How did we lose it?
Don’t just read it and lament. Think about it. For the love of God, think about it!
***
I could go on for another fifty thousand words, and on occasion I do. But I think the setting has been sufficiently well painted in. If you’re asking “What do we do about it?” you’re good-heartedly asking the wrong question.
You cannot reverse it. You cannot even halt it. It’s not possible to save what has been so thoroughly ruined. But you can escape it.
Ann again:
Folks, you better have a plan. And your plan needs to account for the ability of the society you live in to maintain the ability to have such luxuries as running cold potable water, flush toilets, electrification, commodity production and transport, antibiotic production and delivery, and anesthetized surgery by a skilled surgeon… just to name a few items. And, of course, the Sacraments of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
[…]
GET OUTTA DODGE, Y’ALL. Step 1: Get your children and grandchildren OUT OUT OUT of the public and infiltrated private schools.
As for Step 2 et sequelae, I shall refer you to my esteemed, invaluable colleague David de Gerolamo. I beseech you to read as much of his oeuvre, and that of his Co-Contributors, as you possibly can. His compass reads true north.
This is a very astute observation. It’s a major milestone in the death of a fiat currency when its issuers need to get bribed in a harder money. https://t.co/0l6DRFrTtR
Ponder that! Remember that when the corruptocrats of other countries solicit bribes, they usually demand that they be in American dollars…well, they used to.
I despise the great majority of politicians…but I’m beginning to like Matt Gaetz.
Today, September 28, Catholics commemorate the life of Saint Wenceslaus:
St. Wenceslaus (907–935 A.D.) was the son of the Duke of Bohemia. His grandfather was converted to Christianity by the missionaries Sts. Cyril and Methodius. His mother, Dragomir, was the daughter of a pagan tribal chief who was baptized at her marriage. After the death of his father, Wenceslaus received a Christian upbringing from his grandmother, St. Ludmila, while his mother reverted to her pagan ways. Dragomir reigned as regent, had St. Ludmila killed, and worked to oppose the spread of Christianity in Bohemia. When St. Wenceslaus was 18 he took control of the government and exiled his mother. St. Wenceslaus was described as a pious, humble, and intelligent ruler who worked to established Christianity in the land that would become part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was known for his vow of virginity, his many virtues, and his life of prayer and good works. After a political dispute arose, his mother and his younger brother, called Boleslaus the Cruel, plotted his murder along with a group of disaffected nobles. Boleslaus invited his brother to celebrate the feast of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, and arranged to have him assassinated on his way to Mass. St. Wenceslaus muttered words of forgiveness as he died, and his body was buried at the murder site. His brother succeeded him as Duke of Bohemia. Three years later Boleslaus repented of his crime, and had his brother’s remains transferred to the Church of St. Vitus in Prague. Wenceslaus was considered a saint by the people at the time of his death. His feast day is September 28th.
Seems that in the Tenth Century A.D., mothers had to “contract out” the murder of their unwanted children. Today you can have it done in an abortion mill for a few bucks. Walk-ins welcome! No appointment necessary!
Mass murder of the unborn, unchecked rioting and looting in cities, tyrants forcing their subjects to poison themselves, shameless corruption in high places, “news media” that lie without compunction, perversion and delusion openly encouraged by the schools, madmen claiming they have to “save the planet” by destroying civilization and killing off most of Mankind…hm. Maybe the Dark Ages didn’t end. Maybe they just got darker.
I don’t need one. I need seven of them. Standard combat load, because this country is going down the shitter and the civilization our fathers built is being discarded.
Does that seem harsh? It might be, but that’s what happens when criminals are allowed to do what they want and the government encourages it. I don’t have a cop car, and handcuffs, and a jail to hold the lawbreakers, and a system of people to adjudicate the law. All I have is a rifle, and the will to defend my family and my property. When you stop the police from keeping the peace, then every crime can carry a death sentence.
Carlson noted that human sacrifice, ritual child sacrifice in particular, “rears its head about every four chapters. … Of all the sins the ancients committed, that sin, every single time it’s described, is called detestable, at least in the [Revised Standard Version].”
In virtually every instance, Carlson suggested the terms of the sacrifice were more or less clear: In exchange for the annihilation of innocence and innocents, the bloodied perpetrators would receive “power and contentment and happiness.”
[…]
Carlson suggested that this unnatural but universal decision, which “cuts against the imperative of evolutionary biology” and does not appear to have been reached organically, is the result of “outside forces … acting on people at all times throughout history, in every culture on the planet, to convince people that if they sacrifice their children, they will be happy and safe.”
And furthermore:
“The one unalloyed source of joy in your life is your children. The point of life is to have children and to watch them have grandchildren. Nothing will bring you joy like that,” said Carlson. “So anyone telling you ‘don’t have children,’ ‘kill your children’ is not your friend, is your enemy.”
Well, I must qualify the “unalloyed source of joy” a wee bit. These days especially, parents pay for the privilege of having children in time, money, energy, and sacrifice. Viewed solely as a luxury expenditure – which many do, sad to say – it doesn’t look like a “good buy.” Worse, Western societies are raising the price even as we speak. Yet Carlson’s statement is much truer than not.
James: I’m not ready to be a father. Nefarious: Oh. James: It’s her body. She can do what she wants. Nefarious: “Do what thou wilt. That shall be the whole of the law.” James: You arrogant son of a…Who—who are you to judge me? This is my life. I…I can live it the way I want. Nefarious: Yes, James! I couldn’t have said it better myself. But it’s still murder. James: Says who?
Nefarious: Says all of creation, James.
And if I may:
What are you, Fountain?
She struggled to discern the import of the question.
“I am futanari. A clone of another such.” –Not that. What is the essence of your gift? What power do you possess that enables you to do the things you have done?
“To see the life in all things, and to love it and speak with it.” –And what is the mission of all life?
Months earlier, Father Ray had asked her to contemplate that very question. Yet he had not returned to the subject since then.
“To become…more. Better.” –And how does anyone or anything become more than it is?
“Through love. Loving and being loved.” –Exactly. You are greatly skilled at loving. You have the power to assist growth by giving love. You can still do so. Rise up!
To return to the original subject: What’s particularly noteworthy to me is how much more forthright, on this and other issues of importance to those of us in the Right, Carlson has become since his departure from Fox. We can only speculate how much he had to restrain himself during his Fox years. How much of it was commanded by management and how much was Carlson’s own sense for what he could say safely, only he knows. But I look forward to more of him in this mode. It makes a dramatic contrast with the pabulum most other commentators serve up.
CHICAGO – Chicago’s newest migrant shelter has opened up in the West Loop, and it’s creating tension between a landlord and tenants.
The bottom floor tenant at a warehouse-style building at 344 N. Ogden is a retail business. The owner tells FOX 32 that the migrants just moved in starting Friday.
Thomas De Boer, president of the recently-opened Chicago Card Club, said the fact that part of the building he just signed a lease for is now being used to house migrants will kill his business, and cost him in the neighborhood of $100,000.
“It’s devastating,” said De Boer. “You plan for so long to start a new business, you get excited, you pour loads of your own personal funds into it, just to have the landlord come and destroy it.”
There’s no mention of whether De Boer’s landlord is getting money from the municipal government to shelter those illegal aliens. It seems next to guaranteed, but there’s always a possibility that he’s simply a soft-headed idiot. There must be some such in Chicago, to have voted for Lori Lightfoot, and then to replace her with Brandon Johnson.
Chicago is already suffering the loss of a great many businesses that once called the city their home. Now it appears that its “sanctuary city” policy will deter the formation of any new businesses as well. Not that we couldn’t have predicted that, of course. But do Chicagoans, including its Communist mayor, believe that Chicago can survive without businesses? Employers? Sources of tax revenue?
New York City is learning the same lesson. Which will concede to reality, I wonder? Either? Both? Neither?
Phillip: I should note that you did vote against the defense appropriations bill this week, the rule to…
Gaetz: Abby, this is going to be a very embarrassing moment when the internet corrects you on this. I voted for the defense rule both times.
Phillip: Well, I, uh, stand corrected. Congressman, thank you for joining us tonight.
A movement, or a regime, that demands your total allegiance and compliance at all times must never, ever allow reality to intrude. A single objective, verifiable fact, if it contradicts “The Party’s” assertions, can bring down its whole edifice. They who seek to know will always follow the trail that one fact opens to them: that there is an objective reality, and that “The Party” is its enemy.
“There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that’s all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns—just somebody naming the exact nature of what you’re doing?”
And their first words to any US Government person should have been “¿Donde esta la biblioteca?” Instead, we get this.
… in September 2023, the Romeikes were told during a routine check-in that their deferred status had been revoked. The family was given four weeks to apply for German passports, so they could be deported to Germany. The family had no prior warning, and was offered no explanation, other than that there had been a “change of orders.”
In the 10 years that the Romeikes have lived peacefully in the United States, they’ve built a second life: they have two children who are American citizens, and two other children who married American citizens (one of these couples recently welcomed their first child).
So if you can run, jump or swim across the Rio Grande while carrying the flag of your invading country, you get welcomed with open arms and given thousands of dollars (our tax dollars) in goods and services while being invited into any part of the country that you want to go.
Do things legally, and you get screwed. Be a Christian family, you get screwed. Marxist illegal alien wetbacks get immediate aide and help, Christian homeschoolers get the shaft. If you’re a Christian, a homeschooler, or anyone who actually believes that the Constitution should be followed, then the government hates you and will actively work against you, while welcoming your replacements that flood across the Southern border by the thousands every day.
Some days there isn’t enough coffee to keep me calm. I have wood-cutting to do. Perhaps a good chainsaw session where I imagine the various government agencies tied to a log will get rid of some stress.
I know, I know: most of what I write, here or elsewhere, would be considered rather “off-axis” by readers and writers with mainstream sensibilities. But I write first of all for myself. Consider it a purgative that doesn’t produce messes on the bathroom floor. And let us quickly leave that unfortunate metaphor, and proceed to the substance of today’s screed.
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
We know things are bad — worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
My morning’s survey resulted in a “Future Columns” folder with twelve links in it, all of them marked “Must address this.” It had been empty before I started to go through my news and op-ed sources. The collection was composed entirely of stories that had me aflame with righteous fury. If one of your loved ones has an Irish temper, you really don’t want him to encounter the number of incitements to rage that I experienced so far this morning. Trust me on that.
One story was about the “disaster” some clown foretells from the threatened government shutdown. His main concern was for the LGBTQ crowd and its “rights.” With that to top off the slag heap, I was barely able not to scream:
I’m not sure how I managed to refrain.
So I’ve decided to write a little about storytelling.
***
The imperatives of storytelling are uniform across all media. Whether you’re producing a short story, a novel, a screenplay, a poem, a movie, or some other form of narrative, you must obey the same commandments:
Give the audience what it wants;
Don’t waste its time or effort.
Fairly simple stuff, really. Yet a lot of would-be storytellers never quite get it. Some are led astray by their admiration for something some other writer has said, or has done. Some fixate on an aspect of technique that should remain subordinate to the telling of the story. Some are unable to give their chosen tale the right pacing, or the right emphasis, or the right collection of characters through whom to tell it. In this as in other complicated undertakings, there are many ways of failing to honor the two commandments enumerated above.
The commandments should evoke questions:
What does the audience want?
What would waste its time or effort?
Today I’d like to focus on the first of those questions, because I think once it’s been answered, the answers to the second one will become utterly plain.
***
There’s an old movie – it was released in 1971 – that provides a striking example of “what the audience wants.” Its plot is pretty simple, really. The viewpoint character is a teenage boy on a resort island during the summer of a year of the Second World War. As is the case with many teenage boys, he’s anxious to taste the pleasures of the flesh. In this quest he comes in contact with a slightly older woman, whom he tries somewhat clumsily to impress. (Hey, he is a teenager.) Late in the movie, after the protagonist has had some awkward experiences with a girl his age, the woman receives word from the Army that her husband has been killed in battle. She turns to the teenage protagonist for what Robert A. Heinlein called “the only way to console a widow.” Shortly thereafter, the woman leaves the island for home; the teenager will never see her again.
It’s not an exalted movie, really. It’s told in fits and starts. Some of the dialogue rings strangely in a contemporary ear. The music, while catchy, is a bit syrupy. And the scenery on the island is beautiful enough to be distracting, though I doubt any filmmaker would prefer boring or ugly scenery for his story’s backdrop. But it gives the audience what it wants, in quantity. Stanley Kubrick, himself no slouch at storytelling, called it one of his favorites.
The audience wants an emotional journey: people going through changes that affect them deeply. All else is either technique or irrelevancy.
***
If the story you plan to tell can evoke the reader/viewer’s emotions, and if you can “stay out of the way” in telling it, it will work. It will give the audience what it wants. That’s no guarantee, of course, that your audience will be large. I’m the opposite of a promotion and marketing expert, as my circulation figures testify rather loudly. But I know stories.
Yes, there are traps and pitfalls. Yes, it’s possible to be overly dramatic, or overly maudlin. Some narrative techniques are unsuitable to some stories. Some writers indulge in stylistic arabesques that distract the reader from the story being told. But these are consequences of inappropriate (or inappropriately applied) technique. They proceed from how the story is told. The proof is in this: There are only three basic stories. All of them are about what makes a person change:
He can change as a result of introspection;
He can change because of an interaction with others;
He can change because of a challenge presented by his world, whether or not he meets it successfully.
The story told by the movie I described above is of the second variety. Writers discussing the storyteller’s art sometimes call it the Boy Meets Girl story. And though stories of its kind have been told innumerable times, it remains as fresh as the sunrise.
Excuse me? What was the movie I was talking about above? It’s Summer of ’42, starring Gary Grimes and Jennifer O’Neill. It’s available on DVD, and from Amazon Prime as a rental. And if I ever write something half as affecting and memorable, I’ll call myself a writer.
Never, ever, ever ever everevereverever use Fecesbook as a source of information.
Like many people, I have a presence on fecesbook. For me, it’s about motorcycle rides, motorcycle groups and motorcycle activities. For a multitude of reasons, many of the various motorcycle groups out there use fecesbook as a way to get their events out to the public, and I love riding, so I do what I have to do in order to find the rides and the groups.
Along with that, I am part of a small military minded group of people who have a group chat. Not even a page, just a chat group where we can kibitz about the latest going-ons, do some brainstorming and complain about the latest bone-headed moves by the leadershits that are currently in charge.
Yesterday I had read this Substack regarding the infected anal wart known as General Mark “Did you assume my pronouns” Milley, who is an unmitigated failure at every level, who’s performance as CJCS would have his predecessors hung from lamp-posts. We’re talking about an ulcerated herpes sore who assured the Chicoms that he would call them if Trump did something he didn’t agree with, who presided over the disaster in Afghanistan that allowed BILLIONS of dollars of weapons and equipment and technology to fall into the Taliban’s hands, and thus into Russia, China and Iran’s hands. This, in a sane world, would be called “Giving Aide and Comfort to the Enemy” and result in a short drop and a quick stop, but we don’t live in a sane world. This grotesque parody of a warrior sat on his thumbs while military readiness began dropping like a stone due to his woke “leadership”, getting to the point where the Army, rather than being able to recruit actual warriors, DOWNSIZED THE FORCE by approximately 15,000 troops.
That, my friends, is a DIVISION worth of missing recruits. That is a level of failure that should have sent Milley to Ft. Leavenworth for the rest of his life. At the very least, he should have been booted from his position in disgrace. Instead, he’s allowed to sail off into the sunset (and his future seven-figure job at some military-industrial industry) while the Army that he sunk into a morass of woke idiocy and complacency can’t find the troops to fulfill it’s mission.
Don’t even get me started on Lloyd Austin, that walking piece of shit. He shouldn’t just be hung. Hanging is too good for him. A firing squad is too good for him. That ignorant, arrogant ass should be drawn and quartered for his sins against this country, the military as a whole and my Army.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, the Substack piece. I tried to send a link to my military pals over the group chat. It failed to send. Huh. Well, I went and found a work-around link, tried to send it, and it failed to send yet again. As I was searching through the links, trying to find out why I couldn’t send a simple link in a group chat, I came across this:
Fecesbook is already setting the battlefield up for the National Socialist Democrat Worker’s Party. Any dissent cannot be allowed. Any argument against their idols must be stopped. Any pushback against their narrative will be blocked.
Never use fecesbook for any kind of news or real information. You won’t be able to get it. The truth is lies. Up is down. Black is white. Good is bad. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Love Big Brother.
And it’s only going to get worse. Act accordingly.
…it does rather look like evidence of a decades-long, world-girdling conspiracy in motion, doesn’t it? But I wouldn’t want to sound like one of those “QAnon types,” so perhaps I should just present the evidence for my Gentle Readers’ assessment.
***
1. Thou Shalt Not Mention The Evidence!
I admire anyone who’s willing to brave the storms of racial propaganda and animosity…the storms coming from Negroes and Leftists, that is. One such intrepid commentator is Heather Mac Donald:
Iconoclast Heather Mac Donald is not shy about sharing her opinion, and never has that been more apparent than at recent talk at UC Berkeley School of Law, during which the bestselling author staunchly defended the themes in her recent book “When Race Trumps Merit.”
Mac Donald’s visit, hosted by the Federalist Society, prompted a protest consisting of about two dozen students in the audience who held signs such as “Black Lives Matter” and “Equity is beautiful” and asked pointed questions, including from one student who said he felt “assaulted” by her arguments.
There it is right out in front of God and everybody: the “I feel unsafe!” cry from those who can’t bear to look at unpleasant facts. But let’s return to the article:
“I just want to tell you right now that your book is racist, your arguments are racist. They are based in eugenics. They are based on ideas that black people and brown people can never compete with white and Asian counterparts,” one law student said during the Q&A, asking why anyone should take her work seriously when all she does is “peddle racist drivel.”
Here’s the “law student” who made that statement:
And here’s what Mac Donald actually said:
“If I believe that blacks can never compete, I would say, yeah, we’ve got to lower standards, because that’s the only hope for getting diverse institutions. In fact, I believe that if we held … high expectations that blacks would successfully compete,” Mac Donald said.
Is she right about that? I don’t think so myself, but who the BLEEP! am I to have an opinion? The “law student” in the photo above has an opinion, though; you can infer it from her “racist / eugenicist” statement. Do you think she wants Negroes to be held to the same standards as white and Asian students?
Now, now, let’s not always see the same hands!
***
2. The Day Care Business Must Not Be Lucrative Enough.
A kilogram of fentanyl was stored on top of children’s play mats used for napping at the New York City day care where a 1-year-old boy died from exposure to the drug, according to a new federal criminal complaint.
[…]
Day care operator Grei Mendez and tenant Carlisto Acevedo Brito are now facing federal charges of narcotics possession with intent to distribute resulting in death and conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death, according to federal prosecutors.
In a case that’s “shocked the conscience of the city,” the defendants allegedly “poisoned four babies and killed one of them because they were running a drug operation from a day care center” in the Bronx, Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for Southern District of New York, said at a news conference Tuesday.
I wouldn’t worry too much about this incident, Gentle Reader. Cases that “shock the conscience of the city” seldom evoke changes to established ways, especially when the persons involved are Negro or Hispanic. Besides, it was only one kid that died. But tell me, please: do you put your children into a day care center? What sort of persons own and operate it, pray tell? Do you know anything about their after-hours activities, or their associates, or their criminal records?
***
3. The Left Does Seem To Have A Problem With Kids, Though.
Kamala Harris has been making herself useful to her party by going on the road to promote abortion:
Harris’ speech at North Carolina A&T University on Sept. 15 was part of her “Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour,” an effort to mobilize college students to vote and support the Democratic agenda on a variety of issues, including the expansion of abortion.
Prolife students responded by gathering on the Greensboro campus to express opposition to killing unborn children.
According to members of the group, they engaged in positive dialogue with students on campus. When the vice president’s speech was over, however, things got ugly.
Moonbats stole signs from the prolifers.
One young man can be seen taking the Students for Life group’s marker and sign and writing “BLM,” otherwise known as Black Lives Matter, on it. The crowd cheered as he raised the sign and danced around.
This should help clarify matters for anyone unclear on whether pro-abortion militants are merely mistaken or malevolent:
Two others can be seen on video holding up signs that say “F*** dem kids,” while the crowd is heard chanting the same.
Sometimes, comment is unnecessary.
***
4. A Great Light Dawns.
The more sobersided commentators in the Right have refrained from calling a spade a spade when the implications of its spadehood are “extreme.” But as we totter ever nearer to an abyss from which there can be no recovery, even the most restrained of them are beginning to speak plainly:
Why won’t Biden comply with the law and close the border? By adhering to his constitutional responsibility, he would end a massively unpopular policy that, as Secretary Braverman says, threatens the democratic legitimacy of his administration. So why is he so insistent on opening the doors to millions of illegal immigrants?
I think there is only one plausible answer. I think that admitting tens of millions of illegal immigrants is a critically important part of the Democratic Party’s strategy for perpetuating its own power. There are several long-term tides that are running against the Democrats. Republicans have more children than Democrats do, and minorities that used to vote reliably Democrat are shifting toward the GOP. How can the Democrats retain their grip on power? By adding many millions of residents who, through pervasive voter fraud, will provide winning electoral margins. And their children will be able to vote legally.
Out of my longstanding admiration for the author of that piece, I shall restrain myself from a snarky rejoinder. But it must be frankly said that every item of relevant evidence since the Usurpers took control of Washington has made it plain that one of their primary goals is to increase illegal immigration to the highest possible level:
They’ve halted the construction of the border wall.
They’ve sold the unused wall components to prevent their use.
They’ve relocated illegals into the interior of the country by bus and plane.
In an act of previously unimagined defiance, they’ve welded the gates in the border wall open.
The only thing they haven’t done is kidnap foreign nationals from their home countries and fly them to the U.S. willy-nilly. And don’t bet the rent money that that’s not in their back pockets should their current machinations not suffice.
***
5. In Closing.
You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate the penetration and eloquence of the writers who adorn The Catholic Thing. One such frequent contributor is John M. Grondelski:
A Catholic philosopher might explain ressentiment through the prism of our orientation to the good. Because human beings are hardwired for the good, they even choose evil under the appearance of good. And because that hardwiring also structures the human mind, the person who persists in evil must redefine reality so that down is up, and evil is good. Ressentiment is very much the spiritual rebel’s philosophical response to “Did God really say. . . ?”
Ressentiment also seems to have a parasitic relationship to nominalism, the belief that names are mere conventions. The ease with which ressentiment reshuffles the “labels” of a real order creates, especially for the woke, a new order of being. For example, abolishing the dreaded “gender binary” becomes absolutely compelling. It’s not just a “label.” It’s a mandatory new “value.”
[…]
The diminution of religion from right to merely (or even primarily) interest tainted whatever it touched, so the exclusion of religion from public life was – at least to elites – desirable. It was, in fact, a degradation, as Shaw’s quotation shows: by leveling religion to a mere “interest,” one could then balance religious workers’ claims to Sabbath observance against the necessity of the atheist’s need for Sunday delivery of his vegan tofu ranchero wheatberry salad. Free exercise is clearly “a genuine threat to. . .businesses. . .[serving] diverse population[s].” Now we know the really important “interests.”
Please read it all. You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate Dr. Grondelski’s insight and force.
***
That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. I’ve just glanced fleetingly at my agenda, and I’m thinking seriously of taking a full-time job once again so I can get some rest. Whatever, be well.
