Cold Fury

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Lock. Her. UP

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No, not Hillary!™ this time. Well, okay, her too.

A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was arrested for larceny last month after she was caught on video taking a sign belonging to pro-life activists. The arrest arrives just days after the arrest of a UNC-Chapel Hill student accused of physically assaulted a pro-life activist after allegedly getting angry over his sign.

After which, hilarity ensues.

“Look, sir, I’m not trying to get arrested,” said the student to the officer, after he had informed her that she was being detained for larceny.

“I cannot believe these are the people who you protect,” continued the student, referring to the pro-life activists.

“I’m not trying to protect anyone, but I do have to enforce the law,” responded the officer, “That’s just how it is.”

“Do you see us being subjected to this shit?” said the student, gesturing toward the pro-life signage.

What I see is a sniveling, overprivileged dumbass OUTRAGED!™ at being “subjected” to any opinion that differs from her own.

“They have a right to be here,” said the officer, “If you don’t like their views, you can go away, you don’t have to watch it.”

“It doesn’t matter how much you ignore them, they’re gonna come back, and they’re gonna come back again, and this is why women have such a problem getting abortions in North Carolina, and y’all just let them get away with this shit,” said the student, “I cannot believe y’all let this happen.”

Since when have women had any problem at all getting as many abortions as they want, as often as they want, in North Carolina or anyplace else, you baby-murdering bitch?

“Take your backpack off, turn around, and put your hands behind your back, you’re under arrest for larceny,” said the officer.

“I cannot believe this is happening,” said the student upon realizing that she was under arrest, “is there something else that I can do?”

“No, I just told you you’re under arrest,” replied the officer, “I cannot un-arrest you.”

And then the piteous weeping starts, which is a pure delight to watch. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. As Ace likes to say: LOL get fucked. More:

The student grabbed the sign from Austin Beigel, a peaceful protester, and walked off with it – not realizing that an officer would meet her at the end of her path.

“Did you steal their sign?” the officer asked the feminist.

“I just moved it,” she responded.

“Well you took it,” the officer confirmed.

The young feminist then had the nerve to ask the officer why she was being detained. With a look of disbelief on his face, the officer responded, “Uhh…larceny. You stole his sign.”

I’m sure you can guess what happened at this point: the student pulled out her cherished “victim card.”

“I moved it 50 yards,” she said as she tried to weasel out of the situation.

“I don’t care if you moved it one foot,” the officer responded before he gave a needed lesson in ethics. “You don’t have the right to take someone’s property. Period. I don’t care what the circumstance is.”

“I know you may not agree with what’s being said,” he continued. “But you don’t have the right to take someone’s property. Okay?”

One would hope that Little Einstein would be capable of learning this vitally important lesson. Unfortunately, one’s hope would be in vain; the fascist cunt will doubtless be carefully nursing a grudge over how horribly she was “victimized” for the rest of her days, self-righteously blibbering on to anybody willing to listen about her “courageous” and “heroic” days of protest and oppression.

Yeah, tell me again about how we can live peaceably among shitbrains so thoroughly and irredeemably wrong about what free speech, tolerance, and civility are all about, whydon’tcha.

Why is that these leftists think they can commit stupid acts without facing the just consequences of their actions?

Because they’ve been allowed to do exactly that for way too long, that’s why.

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Southern by the grace of God

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Interesting reflection on Southern identity, from Z.

In reality, those types we get from popular culture are caricatures of old realities, more than anything based in present reality. In the major population centers in the modern South, you will be hard pressed to find the snaggle-toothed redneck or the courtly southern gentleman. Instead, it is mostly middle-class suburban people living better than most of the country. The quality of life in the modern South is much higher than most of the country, which is why so many are moving there.

Which, in turn, is why the quality of life here won’t be staying higher for long, as ever more damn-Yankee carpetbaggers flee the nest they’ve fouled to come here and foul mine, via the selfsame bonehead liberalism that ruined theirs.

All that said, the South is going to be on the cutting edge of identity politics, even if it struggles to forge a new identity. Georgia is 55% white, with a large black population spoiling for a chance to hold the whip hand over whites. Florida is 56% white with a swelling population of Caribbeans. Texas is already minority white and the flood of migrants is making it more so. It is in the South that white identity, regional identity and identity politics will be the defining issues in the very near future.

How this breaks out is hard to know. There are people with ideas about it, like the folks at Identity Dixie, with whom I did an interview recently. They are in many ways the New South, in that they are college educated, middle-class guys. As I like to put it, the new Southern man has a pickup truck, but it cost sixty grand, has leather seats and the bed has only ever seen his kid’s toys and his golf clubs. If it has a bumper sticker on it on, it is for parking at his office building or maybe his golf club.

It is hard to know where this goes. It is in the South where the homogenization and financialization of America is most obvious. Vast developments of identical houses, with Potemkin “town centers” populated by strangers from all over the earth, is just as much a part of the New South as anything else. If someone had moved away from the Charlotte area thirty years ago and returned for the first time today, they would be in a foreign country. Even NASCAR is different from the recent past.

He said a mouthful there. Actually, if someone had moved away from Charlotte even ten years ago he’d find himself bewildered. My brother says all the time that he often feels as if he’d gone to bed one night and then woke up the next morning to find himself on another planet. The entire landscape has changed, both physically and in terms of those who inhabit it.

For my money, Southern identity is being washed away in favor of a flavorless, dull homogeneity. In fact, it’s all but gone already. It’s pretty rare now to hear a good ol’ hayseed accent around here, unless you’re out in the remoter areas talking to what we used to call country-folk—like, say, Kannapolis, where my mom’s people hail from. Most now speak in a flat, generic dialect that offers no hint of the speaker’s regional roots. In my callow youth, that lazy-mouthed redneck drawl used to annoy me sometimes. Now, I find myself missing it.

Funny thing is, when I first moved to NYC back in the 90s people used to ask me all the time what part of England I was from. Then, I’d come home for a weekend to have folks upbraid me for talking like a Yankee. An indication of how bizarre and indecipherable my own patois is, maybe. My daughter speaks in a very crisp, clearly-enunciated way, with no trace of any kind of accent I can discern, most certainly not a Southern one. Her mom is from rural Ohio, and the young ‘un doesn’t really talk like her either. It’s…interesting, I reckon.

As goes the dialect, so goes the region. For better or worse, Southern culture is on the skids, its once-distinct identity eroded into boring sameness. Yes, the only true constant is change, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Sadly, as that bright Southern color gets sandblasted off, the culture subsumed into an increasingly-amorphous American blob, something precious is being lost forever. But hey, we’ll always have our memories, right?



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Worst. NazibigotHitler. EVER

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So incompetent he can’t even get homophobic bigotry right.

Out of all the criticisms of Donald Trump, the one I’ve never understood is that he’s somehow anti-gay. The Trump/Pence ticket was supposed to have put up conversion-therapy camps all across America by now, right? Yet somehow it hasn’t happened. With all the legitimate reasons for a person to oppose Trump, they still keep making stuff up.

Pete Buttigieg has been capitalizing on this, depicting himself as some sort of victim. He wants you to think Trump is oppressing him. He just can’t seem to get Trump to play along.

Check out this clip from an interview Trump just gave to Steve Hilton, which will air on Fox News this Sunday night. Hilton asks what Trump thinks of Buttigieg’s marriage:

“I think it’s absolutely fine…I think it’s great. I think it’s something that perhaps some people will have a problem with. I have no problem with it whatsoever. I think it’s good.”

Is that not the right answer, libs?

Dude, of course not. No answer Trump gives will EVER be right.

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An inconvenient shooting

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Not politically useful to the gun-grabbin’, goosesteppin’ Left.

School shootings are terrible events — except for the left where they represent opportunities, as in Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste” modus operandi.

CNN, for example, wasted no time in politicizing the latest school shooting in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.

After the shooting, other than some virtue signaling by the media, the story has left the front pages, as the narrative may be inconvenient for the leftist agenda. CNN and MSNBC have lived up to their reputation as “drive-by media” by quickly moving on. No interviews with David Hogg or other gun control fanatics. So, what are some of the inconvenient aspects to this story that the media would prefer to drive by without any discussion or analysis?

Oh, there are lots of them listed here, each and every one pushing precisely the wrong Progtard buttons, thereby guaranteeing the story’s speedy interment. In fact, this one was apparently deemed to be so potentially damaging to our Leftist lords and masters that Enemedia’s usual tacit agreement to quietly abandon further reporting wasn’t enough. The courts got involved, Soviet-style, to make sure those pesky facts STAY buried.

The case of two anti-Trump leftists, one of whom is transgender, who shot up a school in Denver last week has been placed under seal by a judge, banning the public from seeing it.

Devon Erickson, 18, and Alec McKinney, 16, opened fire on two classrooms at the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) charter school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, on May 7, killing one student and injuring eight others.

16-year-old Alec McKinney identifies as male but is biologically female, having been born Maya Elizabeth McKinney.

Following the shooting, it emerged that his accomplice Erickson had posted anti-Christian and anti-Trump messages on social media while praising former President Barack Obama.

It is now being reported that details of the case will remain secret to the public after it was sealed by a judge.

Via Komrade Bill, who adds: “As near as I can tell, it’s still up in the air whether the magenta-haired Easter-Worshiper hater was gay or not. If he was, that makes it even more imperative for the left to shove this one right down the memory hole.” I’m sure you meant “she” though, right Bill? Watch out with those unacceptable (if factual) pronouns there, buddy. That hate-crime shit can get you in all kindsa trouble.

So this is where we are in Amerika 2019, folks: a judge is suppressing information in a case that would ordinarily be receiving blanket, 24-7 Enemedia coverage nationwide, in close enough detail as to require the use of an electron microscope. I mean…just…wow. Since we’ve descended so far into propaganda wonderland, and myself having just deployed the obvious Soviet reference, it might be helpful for us to keep the old Soviet-era joke foremost in mind from here on out: there is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda.

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An old friend resurfaces

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Well dang: our old bud Doc Weasel thoughtfully provides us with a bookmark-worthy link to his “Political Violence” post category, a handy-dandy compendium that ought to come in damned useful for research purposes. Thing is, though, I wasn’t even aware he was still out there doing this stuff in the first place. Into Ye Olde Blogrolle you go, Doc, with a quickness.

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A wrong, righted

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The first of many, it is to be hoped.

Only once before, 18 years ago, had I received a telephone call from an incumbent president of the United States, prior to Monday of last week, and I had not spoken to the current president since he took office. When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said “Hello” and started to ask if this was a prank, (suspecting my friends in the British tabloid media), but the caller spoke politely over me: “Please hold for the president,” and two seconds later probably the best known voice in the world said “Is that the great Lord Black?” I said “Mr. President, you do me great honor telephoning me.”

He could not have been more gracious and quickly got to his point, that he was granting me a full pardon, that would “Expunge the bad wrap you got.” He had followed the case closely and offered to come to give evidence at my trial in Chicago in 2007 on one of the counts that was later an acquittal. He said that there would be some controversy, “But you can handle that better than anyone.” I asked “Do you authorize me to say that your motivation is that it was an unjust verdict?” He checked with the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who was in the room, if this would be a problem legally, and was told and affirmed to me that I could say that was his motive and that he was reversing an unjust verdict. “We’ve known each other a long time, but that wasn’t any part of the reason. Nor was any of the supportive things you’ve said and written about me.” I suggested that he knew ”better than anyone” the antics of some U.S. prosecutors. (I had had Robert Mueller as director of the FBI, which we caught installing illegal bugging devices in our home in New York and in many falsehoods; James Comey as deputy attorney general, and Patrick Fitzgerald, now Comey’s counsel, as U.S. attorney in Chicago. They were all, as my distinguished caller on Monday has described Comey, “bad cops.”) We moved briefly on to generalities, greetings to wives, I thanked him for his call and again for the purpose of his call, and the conversation ended.

It was never anything but a confluence of unlucky events, the belligerence of several corporate governance charlatans, and grandstanding local and American judges, all fanned by an unusually frenzied international media showing exceptional interest in the case because I was a media owner. The rock-slide began in 2003 when it came to light that some payments from our American to our Canadian company and to certain executives, including me, though fully revealed in public filings, had not been fully authorized.

Of course, the damage was already done.

As the controversy continued, Local Toronto judges and the Ontario Securities Commission prevented us from running the company, where there was no accounting fraud, hard profitable assets, and $2 billion of shareholder equity, all of which was squandered in poor administration and greedily consumed by court-appointed or sanctioned lawyers and accountants and the relentless intrusions of regulators seeking headlines and not the shareholders’ interest.

The vaporization of two billion dollars of shareholder value affected tens of thousands of families in all parts of Canada and the United States. With aching slowness the case against me disintegrated. Of the 17 counts in 2005, four, including money-laundering and perjury, were abandoned. Nine others were acquittals by a prodigiously un-Solomonic jury, many of whom slept through the proceedings.

On May 7, 2012, I went directly from Miami Federal Prison to the airport and onto a chartered plane and returned to my home in Toronto after an absence of five years. It was seven years less a day after that that President Trump called me. I am now, at last, officially not guilty even in the conviction-mad United States. None of this would have been the subject of a criminal case in any other serious jurisdiction. It was for this fiction that I spent three years and two weeks in prisons and endured significant official persecution in Canada, and the great companies my associates and I built over more than thirty years were torn down, driven into bankruptcy and destroyed, while the trans-border corporate governance hypocrites stuffed a third of a billion dollars into their pockets in ill-gotten professional fees.

I did have the satisfaction of winning the greatest libel settlement in Canadian history ($5 million) from the egregious Richard Breeden, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the other authors of the infamous special committee report of 2004, which really poured gasoline on the fire and ignited the criminal charges. The American criminal justice system is frequently and largely evil; I was convicted for attempted obstruction of injustice. It was never anything but a smear job.

Three years in prison; a multi-billion dollar business destroyed, its who-even-knows-how-many employees thrown out of work; a rightfully-earned personal fortune zeroed out; years and years of hassle, humiliation, anxiety, and surreal, slow-mo destruction. Over a decade and a half of abuse while Grond crawled relentlessly on, shredding everything and everyone caught up in its ravenous maw into bloody pulp.

After having been so ruinously tormented—personally and professionally bled white—at its gratuitous instigation, I’d say Conrad Black is being entirely too generous when he says the American “justice” system is only “frequently and largely evil.” It is WHOLLY so—distorted, dysfunctional, and perverse through and through, incapable of rendering true justice except by accident or happenstance.

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A war unfought is a war unwon

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The Koup Kucks Klowns, exposed.

A common occurrence is to hear or read “conservative” commentators discussing the notion that the left and right are engaged in some sort of grand kulturkampf for the soul of the West.

If only.

The left throws at us wave after wave of panzer battalions and we respond with water balloons.

To call the pantomimic resistance proffered by the pundits of the so-called “conservative” movement a war is a ludicrous overstatement. The left throws at us wave after wave of panzer battalions and we respond with water balloons.

Sure, every now and then an intellectually honest and professionally brave culture warrior sticks his head above the parapet and returns some decent fire, but these brave voices are few and far between and do little to repel the relentless onslaught of “progressive” modernity.

Moreover, both discouragingly and damningly, those happy few who dare resist the left’s cultural revolutions with anything more aggressive than a shrug are often felled by not-so-friendly fire. It seems whenever we get a warrior, there are already voices on our side ready to defenestrate them. This is of course hardly surprising, given that the Mainstream Conservative Movement is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Globalism Inc.

Conservative timidness was bad enough in the 90s and early 2000s, when the left was promoting things like affirmative action and civil partnerships, and invasions of migrant masses were but a distant nightmare confined to the pages of The Camp of the Saints. 

Now we have blatant anti-white bigots like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in Congress and self-obsessed LGBT mayors running for office lecturing us on the true meaning of Christianity. Meanwhile, crossdressers are brought into children’s libraries for story-time, and white kids are picked up from school in tears because their curriculum is so virulently racist against them.

The sour cherry on top of this dystopian progressive cake is that anyone that dares to resist the madness is deplatformed, depersoned, and dehumanized. We are living in the age of thoughtcrime, and it is clear beyond doubt that those who question either progressive or globalist orthodoxy will be reprogrammed or ruined.

The refusal of many in the so-called “conservative movement” to engage fully in any sort of cultural war is a sign that they are not really on our side.

Exhibit A:

WASHINGTON — The Senate has confirmed a new federal judge in Eastern Texas, despite comments he made disparaging former President Barack Obama.

Lawyer Michael Truncale was confirmed, 49-46, on Tuesday. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote against President Trump’s nominee.

Romney said in a statement that his “no” vote was not a matter of qualifications or politics, but because of Truncale’s 2011 comments in which he called Obama an “un-American imposter.”

Romney, who lost to Obama in the 2012 presidential race, called the comments “particularly disparaging” and said that “as the (former) Republican nominee for president, I just couldn’t subscribe to that in a federal judge.”

Got that, folks? This, from a “severe conservative” who has thrown much worse, again and again, at Trump, calling him “a phony, a fraud,” “very, very not smart,” and more. He’s accused Trump of “bad character,” incompetence, and dishonesty. And then there’s this cheap smear from the 2016 campaign:

“Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these,” Romney wrote in a Facebook post at the time.

So here we have a “man” who has viciously insulted Trump, doggedly worked to undermine his agenda as a Senator—in other words, NOT a guy who has any real problem with talking some smack about his political adversaries. But now, in a petty, cheap gesture of defiance towards Trump, this “severe conservative” has joined the Democrat-Socialists in voting against the appointment of a conservative judge because he once expressed a derogatory opinion about…BARRACK FUCKING OBAMA?!?

Yeah, fuck that greasy weasel over, under, sideways, and down—with a rusty razor blade, and sand in the Vaseline. He’s a grimy, grubby, vindictive pissant, a snake in the grass of the same filthy stripe as his pal Obama. He’s a two-faced rumpswab, all butthurt from being passed over for the SecState job after he so obsequiously kissed Trump’s ass trying to get it. Unfortunately, Mittens has plenty of company in the ranks of “Conservative” Inc:

You probably don’t know Senator Richard Burr (R-Chamber of Commerce), because he’s utterly undistinguished in everything except his total commitment to doing the bidding of his corporate donor masters in service of reinforcing the Establishment’s grip on power. He allegedly represents North Carolina, but he is actually the Distinguished Gentlemen from Open Borders. 

And he’s a sap.

He’s chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee – go ahead and insert your own oxymoron joke – and it was with him that Donald Trump, Jr., agreed to give 20+ hours of testimony about the whole bogus RUSSIA TREASON EMOLUMENTS TRAITOR COLLUSION lie on the condition that his testimony was once and done. In the end Mueller, who would have gleefully charged Don Jr. with anything he could have found or invented charged Don Jr. with nada. So, after Mueller reluctantly put a stake in the heart of this garbage scandal – because you know Mueller and his pack of Democrats was slobbering at the thought of a Trump scalp – what did Burr decide to do?

1.Celebrate the total exoneration of the President of the false charges made against him by Democrats and their lying mainstream media transcriptionists?

Or

2.Decide to play along with the Democrats’ craven and malicious effort to keep the lie alive by subpoenaing Don Jr. to testify again about claims made by Federal Convict #86626, aka Michael Cohen, currently a resident of the old stoney lonesome for lying to Congress, as part of an attempt to frame the President’s son for perjury?

“Well, gosh,” you might think, “Only a Democrat-collaborating hack, or slack-jawed idiot, or both, would choose Option Two,” but then you remember we’re talking about an Establishment bot like Richard Burr.

This kind of nonsense is just part and parcel of what Never Trump is. See, though Burr is apparently not running again in four years, he’s laboring under the delusion that by then America will come to its senses and welcome him and his gooey ilk back into unchallenged power. He’s counting on some sort of Establishment payback down the road – a nice job on K Street, an appointment as the token GOP Secretary of Mediocrity for President Creepy Joe, or maybe some CNN hits along with Ana Navarro. He’s burnishing his credentials as one of the Republicans the ruling class can always count on to submit and obey.

He’s Mitt Romney without the dog tormenting. BTW, Mitt was last seen voting against a federal judge nominee because of True Conservatism™ or something.

Heh. Also: ouch. That invidious comparison had to have hurt Barr some.

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Wheels, turning

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And the rats are beginning to turn on each other, as the water flooding the hold drives them to abandon the sinking ship.

A potential rift is emerging between James Comey and John Brennan over who pushed to include information from the unverified Steele dossier in an intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey, a former FBI director, sent an email to subordinates in late 2016 indicating Brennan, a former CIA director, wanted to include materials from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, known as the ICA, Fox News reported.

A former CIA official speaking on Brennan’s behalf is disputing the assertion. The former official told Fox that Brennan and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, opposed Comey’s push to include Steele dossier information in the ICA.

The dispute pits two former intelligence community officials against each other at a time when the Justice Department is investigating how government agencies like the FBI and CIA handled the dossier, which former British spy Christopher Steele authored and the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funded.

Now, I know a lot of folks have become frustrated with the seeming lack of progress towards visiting justice on these cocksure, despicable Deep State malefactors. I’ve struggled with that some myself. Bill’s complaint is a representative sample:

We’ve been groaning under investigations for more than two years, ever more complicated, ever more minutely focused, ever more opaque. We’re drenched with leaks, hammered with interpretation, battered by punditry. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the entire investigatory freak show was designed to destroy any interest in any of it among normal people who work for a living.

We know who the bad guys are, and we know what they did. No more dancing Graham 2.0s, please, with tantalizing promises to “declassify” stuff we’ve known about for a long time. Not one single miscreant has faced a judge yet. The only people actually jailed have been those swept up on ancillary process matters in service to the Witch Hunt For Trump. It’s time to change that.

There are those who say Comey will be the biggest target, but I see no reason why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should not at least face the judicial process, even if they should manage to skate the penalties they really should pay.

But all the rest – Comey, all his gang of corrupt leftist thugs, Clapper and his CIA mob, Brennan, and all the other named miscreants now need to face a hell of a lot more than shame. They need to be sitting in the ultimate perjury trap – an American courtroom passing judgment on their crimes.

Agreed, more or less. Then again, though, I have to offer a mild admonishment: PATIENCE, people. The investigations do FEEL endless, but the truth is the ones we’ve been “groaning under for more than two years” were the PHONY ones; the REAL ones, looking into the origins of the Swamp’s myriad illegalities for specific, actionable offenses, are only just beginning.

Yes, as Bill says, we DO pretty much know who the bad guys are and what they did. But in truth, those are opinions. Indictments, trials, and prison terms aren’t doled out with opinion as their basis, however firmly they may be buttressed by readily-observable reality. That’s why we have investigations in the first place: to provide the legal hook on which to hang criminal charges.

Investigations are but the first step in a process, which can indeed drag agonizingly on. The offenses apparently committed against not only Trump but the American republic itself are grave enough that we can count on the process here being a slow, deliberate one. Which, that ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

Barr looks like a serious man, seriously intent on getting to the bottom of what now looks like being the greatest scandal in our history. As it happens, one of his earliest acts as AG was to appoint another sober, judicious, and yes, serious man—US Attorney John Durham, who has already shown integrity and bull-terrier perseverance in a previous confrontation with the abominably corrupt FBI—a move clearly indicating that Barr suspected from Day One that his investigation was likely to result in indictments and judicial proceedings.

So let’s not throw up our hands just yet, folks. Let the process, long-delayed but moving along at last in an encouraging direction, continue on to its conclusion. Barr, Durham, et al may well flinch in the end from unleashing the kind of profound upheaval likely to come of all this to conclude with a whimper instead of a bang, although the early indications seem to foretell that they won’t. Either way, there’ll be time enough then to sharpen the pitchforks, light the torches, and boil the tar.

Update! I ain’t the only one who sees Barr’s appointment of skull-cracker Durham as a pretty solid tell.

“If I were the Democrats I would be quite worried,” former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Monday night.

And the reason why is, by appointing a U.S. attorney, Attorney General Barr is essentially signaling that he thinks it’s possible that criminal violations occurred in the start of the whole investigation into any kind of Trump-Russian collusion.

As Judge Barr said, there is already an inspector general investigation that’s going to come to a conclusion. That’s what you would do if you were just interested in reforming the way the department does things, the way decisions were made.

But you wouldn’t go with a U.S. Attorney like Durham, someone of his stature, unless the attorney general thinks actually something criminal might have happened, that someone might have violated the law, that there might have been malfeasance, that people at the FBI or the justice department were acting out of partisan motives, not just out of incompetence or stupidity or they were duped by the Russians or Steele or the English or by the Clinton campaign.

So if you are a Democrat, I think you would be really worried to see the appointment of a career prosecutor like this.

Surber says:

Most conservatives have a wait-and-see attitude because we know that Washington takes care of Washington, first, last, and always.

After watching Hillary not only go unindicted but had the FBI destroy the evidence as well, I realize Comey is about as high as they will go.

Still, I believe President Trump will exact a price for this that is high enough to prevent another attempted coup.

But we shall see.

That we shall. Thomas Lifson examines another angle:

Eric Felten noticed something already on the public record last October: that Durham already was investigating leaks to the media from the FBI. This means that at least seven months before his role was revealed, and months before William Barr took office, Durham was on the case. The revelation came not from a leak, but from testimony by James A. Baker, the FBI’s general counsel under James Comey.

The fact that this was kept secret so long, even in the face of this admission slipping out and remaining unnoticed, suggests that the Durham investigation — and maybe Huber’s too — is doing exactly what effective prosecutors do: keeping grand jury proceedings secret, applying pressure to witnesses to sing, maybe offering deals for lighter prosecution and sentence recommendations if they implicate higher-ups, and going for convictions by trial juries, not in the court of public opinion.

I have long believed that the only reason a man like Barr, who was earning millions of dollars a year as a DC lawyer at the very top of his profession, could be lured back into the snake pit of DC politics under Trump would be his devotion to the integrity of our legal/judicial system. If he were a cynic just interested in preserving the establishment that let him succeed so mightily, why not just stay where we was? He had to know that taking on the task of rescuing the system from its abusers would lead to the sort of vilification he now is enduring.

Yep. Patience, people.

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Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…uhhh…well, it’s…ummmm…well, actually, it’s…

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Sky Dong!

The infamous sky penis of November 17, 2017, hovering over the clouds of Washington, was a total mystery.

On that fateful day, the puzzling dong appeared near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, around 30 miles north of Seattle. And although the base accepted full responsibility for the phallic drawing in the sky, the public had no understanding of what had actually happened. How’d that big ol’ boner get up there anyway?

Now, two years later, a military report has shed light on the long-awaited details.

A copy of the military’s sky penis investigation was obtained by Navy Times. On that November day, local news station KREM began reporting on a clearly man-made shape in the sky that resembled a penis and testicles. The formation had upset a local parent and began making the rounds on Twitter. The Navy soon confirmed that one of its pilots had formed the phallus and issued an apology.

“The Navy holds its aircrew to the highest standards and we find this absolutely unacceptable, of zero training value and we are holding the crew accountable,” the base said in a statement at the time.

“Zero training value”? ZERO? Ace dispenses handily with that notion.

A point that should be kept in mind is that someone who is playing while actually doing their job — here, flying, executing what I’m going to guess are somewhat precise turns — is practicing that job at a high level. That is, if you’re doing something that might be unnecessary but is still part of your job and is still training your skill, you are likely learning more in those moments than most moments spent in serious study.

The “gamification” of skill-learning is powerful, I think. People like challenges. Every challenge someone makes up for himself is a little game. He understands the success and failure states. He understands that, even in this play, there is victory and their is defeat.

What I’m saying is that it’s a good thing for people to have fun in doing their jobs. Even if they burn up some extra jet-fuel doing so. A pro golfer isn’t directly helping his golf game when he starts playing around with bouncing the ball up and down from his putter-head like it’s a hacky-sack, but he is learning dexterity and comfort with the putter, stuff about balance and head-attitude he wouldn’t learn from just some more putting practice.

Maybe that won’t be helpful. But maybe it will be. It doesn’t hurt to try something different, seemingly unrelated to the core of the skill, to improve the core of the skill by an alternate angle of attack.

So maybe give these guys a (halfhearted) warning because, whatever, people are scandalized to know that Navy pilots (almost all young men) can be fans of puerile, naughty jokes.

But also bear in mind that one of the highest states of skill-acquisition is having fun with the skill and just showing it off. Doing something that seems to have no practical purpose, if it’s difficult and requires off-the-cuff improvisation and quick learning and adjustment (as the dick-drawing stunt did), does stretch and hone one’s skill.

They did have to plot out a path in three dimensional space and imagine what that path would look like as a two dimensional plane.
That’s not nothing.

The Navy probably handled this innocuous mischief perfectly: PR statements expressing OUTRAGE!, disgust, and contrition, while dealing out a finger wagged in disapprobation and a good talking-to. The officer tasked with the actual the dressing-down problem bit nearly through his lip trying not to bust out in wicked snickering. The transcript of the radio chatter from whence this inspired prank sprang—uhh, sprung?—is hilarious:

In the air that day were two lieutenants, a pilot and an electronics warfare officer, known as an EWO. They were soon edging each other on.

“Draw a giant penis,” the EWO said. “That would be awesome.”

“What did you do on your flight?” the pilot joked. “Oh, we turned dinosaurs into sky penises.”

“You should totally try to draw a penis,” the EWO advised.

The lieutenants began breaking down the concept of drawing a penis in the sky.

“I could definitely draw one, that would be easy,” the pilot said. “I could basically draw a figure eight and turn around and come back. I’m gonna go down, grab some speed and hopefully get out of the contrail layer so they’re not connected to each other.”

You telling me this WASN’T at least somewhat useful training, a honing of relevant skills? Not even a little bit?

To quote the immortal Sgt Hulka: Aww, lighten up, Francis.

Read the rest for sure, it gets even more hilarious from there. Naturally, the libmedia reportage I’ve seen dangles the inevitable “sexual harrassment” angle, although even they can only manage a half-hearted, flaccid stab at it. Yes, I’m sure some humorless bluenoses both in and out of the Navy were utterly mortified by this Crime Against Humanity. But not me. Far as I’m concerned, this stunt is one of the reasons bold, audacious young men become fighter pilots in the first place. Carry on, fellas, and good on ya.

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A true classic, unearthed

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Steyn does one of his typical Big Digs into the long, strange history of a song that’s been one of my absolute favorites since I was a kid, and still is.

In South Africa, it was huge. “Mbube” became not just the name of a hit record but of an entire vocal style – a high-voiced lead over four-part bass-heavy harmony. That, in turn, evolved into “isicathamiya”, a smoother vocal style that descended to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others, taking its cue from the injunction “Cothoza, bafana” – or “tread carefully, boys”. That’s to say, Zulu stomping is fine in the bush, but when you’re singing in dancehalls and restaurants in you’ve got to be a little more choreographically restrained, if only for the sake of the floorboards.

“Tread carefully, boys” is good advice for anyone in the music business. A few years after Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds made their hit record, it came to the notice of Pete Seeger, on the prowl for yet more “authentic” “traditional” “vernacular” “folk music” for the Weavers to make a killing with. He misheard “Mbube” and transcribed it as “Wimoweh”. That’s a great insight into the “authenticity” of the folk boom: the most famous Zulu word on the planet was invented by a New York socialist in 1951…

Still, Seeger was chanting all the way to the bank. “Wimoweh” is a tune that works in any form – as big band (Jimmy Dorsey), folk-rock (Nanci Griffith), country (Glen Campbell), Euro-lounge (Bert Kaempfert), kiddie-pop (*NSync), reggae (Eek-A-Mouse) military march (the New Zealand Army Band), exotica (Yma Sumac), Yiddish (Lipa Schmeltzer), football singalong (the official theme of the 1986 England World Cup Squad). And that’s before we get to REM and They Might Be Giants and Baha Men, and, of course, The Lion King. Solomon Linda’s song has penetrated every corner of the globe. It’s the most famous tune ever to have come out of Africa.

He and his family must be multi-multi-millionaires, right? Not exactly. Linda sold it to the Gallo record company for ten shillings: that would be about 87 cents. Tread carefully, boy. In 1962, just as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was reaching Number One around the world, he died of kidney disease in Soweto, on the edge of Johannesburg, in a concrete hovel with a couple of bedrooms with dirt floors covered in cow dung. He left his widow the equivalent of $22 in the bank and unable even to afford a headstone for his grave. For the last decade he’d swept floors and made the tea at the packing house of the Gallo company. His family lived on a diet of maize porridge – “pap” – and chicken feet.

After Rian Malan drew attention to the plight of Solomon Linda’s heirs, a few music critics took the usual line on the subject. As Thomas R Gruning writes in Millennium Folk: American Folk Music Since The Sixties:

Beyond the economic implications of ‘Mbube/Wimoweh’, the musical development of the song in its different versions illustrates a highly charged symbolic field in which the violence done to Linda’s original piece further reinscribes contested and inequitable power relations between the West and Africa. That is, the issue shifts from conventional notions of cultural imperialism to a more convoluted and complicated process in which ‘plundering and counterfeiting of black culture’ denies the racial authenticities claimed by…

Zzzzzzz. That argument works fine with the likes of Hugo and Luigi and George Weiss. They’re Tin Pan Alley professionals, assignment men. Give Weiss a Broadway score, an Elvis movie theme, and a Zulu chant, and it’s all the same: that week’s job. Who knows what “authenticity” means to such a man? But the only reason the showbiz types were able to “reinscribe” the song in the first place is because of Pete Seeger and the other leftie folkies. The child of wealthy New York radicals, Seeger has always been avowedly anti-capitalist – supposedly. Yet his publisher had a deal with Gallo Music: they snaffled up the rights to “Mbube” cheap and in return sub-licensed to Gallo the South African and Rhodesian rights to “Wimoweh”. And Seeger knew Solomon Linda was the composer. Years later he would plead that back in the Fifties he instructed his publishers to give his royalties from the song to Linda, and he was shocked, shocked to discover decades later that they hadn’t in fact been doing so. But it never occurred to him, as an unworldly anti-capitalist, to check his royalty statements. It was, on his part, supposedly a sin of omission.

Gee, imagine that: another self-righteous, money-grubbing socialist who got rich ripping somebody else off. Why, I’m shocked, I tell you—SHOCKED!!!

Not everyone can plead the same accidental oversight. Having persuaded Linda to sign away his copyright four decades earlier, the relevant parties made sure to slide some forms in front of his illiterate widow in 1982 and his daughters some years later to make sure the appropriation paperwork was kept in order.

And for all Mr Gruning’s huffing about “cultural imperialism” above, it was, in the end, a legacy of colonialism that ended the injustice. There are significant differences between US and English copyright law, and one of them is that the latter attempts to restrain the damage a foolish creator can do to himself. Under British Commonwealth law, the ownership in any intellectual property reverts to the author’s heirs 25 years after his death regardless of what disadvantageous deals he may have signed. In the courtroom, the quiet courtroom, the lawsuit slept for decades, until Solomon Linda’s daughters were apprised of this significant feature of Commonwealth copyright law, and took action. The sleeping lion also took on the Mouse – the Walt Disney corporation, whose film The Lion King had introduced the song to a new generation of children. In America, Linda’s family really had no legal leg to stand on, but, faced with potentially catastrophic complications in Britain, South Africa, Australia, India and other key markets, Disney were only too keen to settle. In 2006, Solomon Linda finally received his due.

Fifteen improvised notes in 1939 powered Africa’s biggest selling record, an entire genre of music, and two separate hit songs on five continents. And, even though those 15 notes and the man who wrote them were buried under all the other names that encrusted to the work, in the end they’re what shine through.

In case you’re a young ‘un and haven’t yet grokked what song Steyn is going on about, this would be it:




The other versions have their merits, but this is the one I myself was smitten by as a kid, still cherish to this day, and most likely always will. Its 80-year backstory is fascinating; the Tokens’ own initial reaction to it is equally so, despite being another chapter of an old, familiar music-biz story:

Back in New York, the Tokens did as they were told but didn’t care for it. “We were embarrassed,” said Phil Margo, “and tried to convince Hugo and Luigi not to release it. They said it would be a big record and it was going out.” It had an orchestra, a trio of Tokens doing the wimoweh-ing, Jay Siegal’s falsetto, an opera singer with a spare half-hour who came in and did a bit of contrapuntal ululating. The first time the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson heard it he had to pull off the road he was so overawed. Carole King declared the record a bona fide “motherf—er”…

It hit Number One at Christmas 1961. Ilonka David-Biluska’s version, “De Leeuw Slaapt Vannacht“, reached Number One in the Netherlands. Henri Salvador’s “Le lion est mort ce soir” was Number One in France. Pace Phil Margo and Ilonka, it is, in fact, very hard not to make a ton of dough from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.

Label tells band to record song; band dislikes song, balks; song is a monster, career-boosting hit; band is forever after bemused by their initial disdain for the record that would unexpectedly bring ’em fame and fortune. Familiar as that story is, though, The Lion Sleeps Tonight seems to wield a magic almost unique in all of Western music; for a pop song particularly, the near-universality and longevity of its appeal is remarkable indeed. Love it or hate it, once you’ve heard it you’ll never forget it. I had it on 45 when I was a kid, and it’s in my Spotify library now. That’s power, people.

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Sex strike

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Yeah, whatevs.

You think, “Nope, progressives can’t possibly be any dumber,” and then they proceed to reset the dumbness bar. The latest example is Alyssa Milano, who has publicly announced she’s not going to have sex anymore until people can once again kill babies without restraint. If that’s what counts as foreplay these days, count us conservatives out.

The 80s TV teen turned leftist Twitter twerp recently tweeted that “Our reproductive rights are being erased. Until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy. JOIN ME by not having sex until we get bodily autonomy back. I’m calling for a #SexStrike. Pass it on.”

Let’s review. Alyssa Milano is not going to have sex unless and until you allow her to kill babies. I am unclear on what our reaction is supposed to be. Does she expect us to pull a 180 on pre-birth infanticide in order to keep the Alyssa Option open?

Liberals are already thoroughly confused (at best – a lot of them know that liberalism is nonsense but embrace it as a vehicle for their personal power), yet when they get going on the abortion issue they get exponentially worse. It’s a pretty simple question – is it okay to kill a human being who has not yet been born? I say “No,” you say “No,” and they say it’s practically mandatory.

It’s not exactly clear why they draw their hardest ideological line on abortion, but they do. Maybe they love to freak out us squares. Maybe they hate the idea of traditional motherhood. Maybe liberalism is just a hideous death cult that has substituted Margaret Sanger for Moloch.

Probably some of all three.

Consequence-free sex via abortion is just one of the weapons in the Left’s anti-family arsenal. Along with his excerpt from the above, Glenn furnishes this amusing graphic:

abstinence-600x403.jpg

Heh. When it comes to baby-murdering Hollywood ho’s, abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. But wait, it gets even worse.

Milano received support from fans and fellow actress Bette Midler joined her in also calling for a sex strike. “I hope the #womenofGeorgia stop having sex with men until these indignities are overturned,” Midler said.

Not that they know me from Adam or would give a shit if they did, but Midler and Milano don’t need to go on any strike as far as I’m concerned. I’d gladly go WAY the hell out of my way to avoid having sex with either one of ’em.

Update! Ouch.

If memory serves Bette Midler’s first hit was her version of “In the Mood”. Forty-five years later, she’s finally not in the mood.

And for that, we can all be thankful.

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RIP the great Tim Conway

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Having howled at his and Korman’s riotously funny, largely-improvised Carol Burnett Show antics with my family each and every week throughout my youth, I was all set to write something up on his death. But Aesop’s obit concisely says it all, and aside from mourning the fact that they just don’t do TV comedy like that anymore, I have nothing to add. The Burnett Show gang were such beloved staples in my home that my strongest reaction whilst watching the vids Aesop included was to think of my long-departed dad. He LOVED Conway and Co, and laughed harder than any of us. Ahh, those were the days all right.

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Fascist is as fascist does

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Just another Democrat-Socialist “hero.”

PHILADELPHIA — When Brian Sims first ran for state representative in 2012, he ran as a new pro-business voice. He was going to be a bridge-builder, brimming with commonsense ideas on pocketbook issues.

Sims never met that promise.

Instead, he became many other things: an outdoor adventurer who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, a partisan attack dog who accused fellow state Rep. Martina White of saying she wanted to deport all immigrants, something his staff had to admit she never said, and a celebrity activist whose lucrative, nationwide speaking circuit earned him an ethics investigation.

He also became the guy who tweeted a photo of himself wearing a suit and a smirk and raising his middle finger to the vice president of the United States as Mike Pence headed to Philadelphia.

Sims wrote: “Let me be the first to officially welcome you to the City of Brotherly Love and my district! We are a city of soaring diversity. We believe in the power of all people. Black, Brown, Queer, Trans, Atheist, & Immigrant. So…get bent, then get out!”

“The power of all people”—except Caucasians, males, heterosexuals, etc. Actually, though, he DID provide a helpful list of who he means by “all people.” Basically, if you ain’t on that list, you’re fair game.

Last week, Sims decided to film his own harassment of a woman outside an abortion clinic here in Philadelphia, calling her an “old white lady” and her beliefs “grotesque” to her face and to the camera. The clear plan was to incite his audience against this peaceful protester, whom he saw as clearly bigoted and evil.

This was an emboldened, out-of-touch, arrogant elected official who woke up one day last week and made a conscious decision to go to Planned Parenthood for the express purpose of fighting and badgering.

And he chose a woman, standing by herself. And he didn’t start a dialogue. He didn’t introduce himself. He badgered her. Repeatedly. Relentlessly. Angrily. He badgered an enemy he himself described as an old lady.

We must reflect on this. This is the extreme Left acting out in public in exactly the manner they ascribe to conservatives: confrontational, intimidating, police tactics, berating women, threatening the First Amendment.

This stunning behavior — premeditated, confrontational, abusing the power of office, targeting women, contrived to gain political benefit — all occurred and was criticized by no one to date on the Left. No elected Democrat has come out and condemned Sims publicly.

Think about that.

No need to. And nobody needs to “reflect” on anything, either; there’s no use in it, it’s worse than a waste of time. Nor will there be any Democrat-Socialist condemnation of Sims’ repulsive violence against his foes. We all already know why: because this is who they are, this is what they do.

No, I’d say “thinking” and “reflecting” time is well behind us, and if any Democrat-Socialists DID condemn his actions, it would be false—they’re all for it, one hundred percent behind him. Hell, getting them to halfheartedly denounce Bernie Bro James Hodgkinson was like pulling teeth. And he was, y’know, shooting people.

No, next time this obstreperous, bullying punk decides to show everybody what a total badass he is by strongarming little old ladies or teenage girls because they dared to disagree with his dumbshit politics, those little old ladies or teenagers need to make sure to have brought along some muscle of their own. Then, should Sims show up feeling frisky, that muscle should proceed to stomp a fucking mud puddle in his worthless ass and walk it dry. Next time, and every time, until the pain of his injuries inspire the necessary “reflection” on his part.

Hate things had to come to this and all, but…well, here we all are. We ain’t the ones that need to “reflect,” as if we were guilty of anything other than being victims of liberal-fascist abuse and violence. We didn’t start this crap. But unless we’re okay with having it continue—and continue to escalate—we cannot, we MUST not, flinch from finishing it. Because that’s all too clearly the only way it’s ever going to stop.

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Reparations bottom line

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What it’s really all about.

Apart from the complexities of determining who might get reparations and who should pay, we never hear about the endgame. Are reparations supposed to resolve black America’s complaints? Or will black America simply turn up the demands, saying that $500B isn’t enough? How much would be enough? One hundred trillion dollars in doubloons? a googolplex of gold rands? all of America west of the Mississippi?

If that part ever gets sorted out, perhaps we could then talk about black behavior. There are the endless shootings and murders in the ghetto. There are the victims of “the knockout game” and muggings in the streets. There are the large groups of blacks who go into restaurants, eat a huge meal, and then strut out without paying, usually disrupting other diners and wreaking destruction on the way out.

It’s highly doubtful that reparations will ever be paid or that black behavior will ever be discussed at policy levels. It’s all about Democrats having a club to beat America over the head with, to keep decent America on the defensive, to keep Republicans in the corner where they don’t know how to respond. Republicans were innocent of imposing slavery or Jim Crow, both of which were as Democrat as the KKK.

Though facts don’t matter on the Left, knowing what’s actually going on helps decent people contain their exasperation at the farce. Democrats and their Deep State confederates use reparations, as they have used the phony Russia investigation, as a political battering ram. They don’t care about damage to America because they don’t care about America. They may well be the most repugnant people in America.

Oh, they surely are that. They have been for a good, long while now.

The author is a lot more nonchalant than I am, though, in his confidence that “reparations” will never come about. Its usefulness as a club for Democrat-Socialists to beat America over the head with is one thing. Its usefulness as yet another bureaucratic grift—a bottomless, eternal money-sink into which they can freely dip to buy voter loyalty, grow government, hire more bureaucrats, and further enrich and empower themselves—is quite another. They’re already feeling its powerful allure, which may well prove irresistible if they can figure out how to keep it from splashing back on them too badly. You can bet more than just a few of them are giving very serious consideration to the practical nuts and bolts of how they might ram it down American throats.

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Christianity, liberty, and their enemies

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By their fruits shall ye know them.

In the late M. Stanton Evans’ remarkable, critically important book The Theme Is Freedom, he develops a brilliant case for the proposition that political freedom depends upon the acknowledgement of an authority higher than any temporal authority: i.e., God. He further argues that of all the belief systems that have ever been followed, Christianity is the only one that emphasizes individual freedom as the rightful condition of men, to be protected from the encroachments of temporal powers. The United States of America, a near to uniformly Christian country for most of its history, is the modern society in which this coupling of religious belief to liberty has been most clearly demonstrated.

Well, our nation’s Founders would certainly seem to agree with that, yeah.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Funny how the rise to power of the fascist Left, the rapid escalation of encroachment on American liberty, and the en masse abandonment of Christianity since the 60s all seem to coincide, ain’t it? Funny, too, how much effort those same Progressivists have spent on rejiggering the Founders as being either skeptical at best about Christianity, openly hostile to it, or considered themselves “Deists”—a manipulative oversimplification that blithely disregards many direct statements on the subject made by the Founders themselves.

Back to Francis.

Given that premise, does it not make sense that they who seek to eradicate human freedom should target Christianity first and foremost? Does it not suggest that anyone you hear ridiculing Christians or denigrating Christianity should be viewed with a degree of suspicion?

It is an irony to pin all the meters against their stops that they who denigrate Christianity cannot argue against it on any rational grounds. They denounce it as “superstition,” “fear of death,” and other irrelevancies. They refuse to treat with its prescriptions…because those prescriptions directly oppose what they seek: power for themselves and their fellow-travelers.

God Himself has only ten rules for us. He asks nothing more. How dare any temporal authority suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that His rules don’t bind us? And how dare any temporal authority demand more than does He?

The enemies of Christianity, one and all, are totalitarian in ambition. That is: they seek the power to decide what is compulsory and what is forbidden, without any boundaries to the scope of their authority. Christians know that this is wrong. We decry it. We protest against it. In reply, our enemies ridicule us, drive us out of the public square, criminalize living by our beliefs, and ultimately exterminate us.

Progressivism is a religion its own self—a particularly jealous one, one that doesn’t like competition. Might go a long way, too, towards explaining their strange affiliation with Islam. I mean, aside from all the gay-hating and woman-oppressing, they DO have a lot in common: authoritarianism, totalitarianism, intolerance for all other beliefs, and no problem at all with using violence to back it all up, just for starters.

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Shadow government shenanigans

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Dirty, through and through.

Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system. Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded to the requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), falsely stating that no such records existed.

“Tracking” them? They were ignoring them. Actually, defying them. The long of it is here. The short of it?

The short of this is that Hillary kept all her official emails on her personal server. When outside parties would make requests, they would only search her unused official accounts and then respond back that no records existed. All the while, they knew Hillary was doing business outside of official channels in a way that clearly subverted FOIA laws.

What we are seeing here is a pattern of continual lying by the Obama administration and its officials about Clinton’s use of a private email server. Furthermore, they did so to directly avoid FOIA requests which were lawfully supposed to be fulfilled.

You are not allowed to simply say “whoops, that’s on my personal account so that’s not subject to FOIA” for obvious reasons. It would allow widespread corruption.

Clinton is bulletproof so nothing will come of this, but it’s just another in the long list of bad, possibly illegal behavior by her and the Obama administration. This entire thing deserves a real investigation and not the whitewashing it got under James Comey. Anyone that opposes that is only doing so for partisan reasons.

Precisely so. Separate, but very much related:

The nature of the government’s surveillance on me and my family is forensically proven and not subject to legitimate question. Yet, unlike with the discoveries about James Rosen and AP, the government has yet to issue its mea culpa. And there’s a reason.

As bad as they were, the other known instances of journalists being spied upon happened under cover of court orders, albeit ones issued in secrecy. But the government spying on me was not done under the authority of a court warrant. That’s why my case is even more dangerous than the others. It implies that the scope of government improperly turning its intel tools on its own citizens, including journalists and political enemies, could be far more extensive than anyone realizes.

How do I know there was no warrant in my case? Not only did inside sources tell me this, but it was also confirmed to me by the Department of Justice inspector general. With no warrant, it means I was perhaps caught up in so-called “incidental” spying upon other figures. Intel sources have told me that when aggressive government agents want to listen in on somebody but know they cannot justify a warrant, they simply find a target around that person and capture their communications in the incidental spying.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, confidential sources had alerted me to longstanding misuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system and the erosion of protections when it came obtaining permission for wiretaps and other surveillance methods. So, the election debacle came of no surprise. I saw it as an extension of years of improper manipulation. It now appears to me as though the effort to target those surrounding Donald Trump had more to do with intel officials’ concern that a President Trump  might dig into these longstanding surveillance abuses with the help of none other than Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

It was no secret in the intel community that Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Obama, was not only aware of long-standing intel agency surveillance excesses, but was also planning to clean house. In the end, Flynn was unable to do the job because he got wrapped up in the Trump-Russia allegations. Funny, that.

Ain’t it. Ain’t it just.

So since the DoJ won’t do its job, I’m left to self-fund my own pursuit of justice in civil court. As I have learned in the process, the fight is much bigger than my own. If the government isn’t held responsible for its unwarranted intrusions in my case, according to my lawyers and a dissenting appellate who just sided with us, the government will have a precedent that provides it with a free pass to spy on any U.S. citizen for any reason with no fear of punishment.

Sadly, the orcs roosting in Morder On The Potomac care not a whit for precedent, permission, or propriety. They do whatever they want, and worry about the flimsy rationalizations for their rampant illegalities when they must. Attkisson is by no means wrong in seeking justice for herself and her colleagues victimized by the rogue, tyrannical abomination now (mis)ruling us all. Nor is she wrong on both the law and the principles underpinning it, which have been flung down and danced upon. But her naivete concerning where all this is likely to go is touching at best. And her apparent belief that our conscienceless Deep State masters consider themselves constrained by legality, the Constitution, decency, or any other damned thing is beyond naive; it’s foolish, if not downright delusional.

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“The fact that there is an attempt by some people to bulldoze others into ‘believing’ their views itself confirms that this is not a science”

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Climate “science”…ain’t.

There are two key pillars of science. First, it doesn’t matter how many “scientists” believe something. All of them could be proven wrong by a single new scientific theory or experiment. Science is always tentatively proven, and it is incumbent on everyone who calls himself a scientist to ask questions even about things that are “settled”. The great physicist Richard Feynman rightly said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. Scientists must continually question everything and everybody.

Second, science must necessarily make accurate predictions. The global positioning system (GPS) in our mobile phones works only because Einstein’s theories of relativity are accurate to the last possible decimal. Science must not just predict the future: it must predict backwards. Our scientific understanding of cosmic microwave background radiation allows us to literally see the universe as it existed a few thousand years after the Big Bang.

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With climate change, things are dramatically unclear and unsettled. Even converting the basic logic of the greenhouse effect into actual estimates for planet Earth is not settled. The IPCC’s Third Assessment Report notes that “If the amount of carbon dioxide were doubled instantaneously … the temperature of the surface-troposphere system would have to increase by 1.2 degrees, in the absence of other changes”. However, some scientists calculate that its impact would be much lower.

Even if we accept this figure of 1.2 degrees, the key question is about these “other changes”, or the feedbacks. IPCCs tells us that positive feedback loops (e.g. from water vapour) from doubling of CO2 will overwhelm negative feedback loops (e.g. from clouds) to lead to a much higher overall temperature in a hundred years. But the IPCC’s approved models have too much variance and the actual, measured temperatures over the past forty years have been much lower than the predicted average of the IPCC-approved climate models. In fact, the list of failed predictions by climate “scientists” over the past 100 years could form a large book in itself.

Climate science is more like “diet science”, in which every second doctor has his own ideas about a good diet. It is a very immature science at best, and most of its current conclusions will be totally rejected with time.

What is global temperature anyway? How is it measured? Why are we looking at the last fifty years and not the last fifty million years? Even simple things like the measurements of temperature are subject to huge disagreements because of complexities like the urban heat island effect. And the fact is that the world has seen much higher levels of CO2 in the past even during ice ages. Until climate science can make accurate predictions of past ice ages and temperatures, will not be ready to be called a science.

And until the “scientists” pimping for it repent of their penchant for Leftist agenda-pushing and grubbing for grant money, it never will be.

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No risk, no reward

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Wilder on risk.

As I’ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, I’ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood. Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what I’m now calling Wilder’s Rule of Risk: What he thought was safe, was risky. What he thought was risky, was safe. He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized “safety” over even minimal risks. He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

Life is like Tom Cruise. It’s short. Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian. Hairy and risky. But you have a choice. You can be afraid and live in fear. You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty. We want to, especially when we’re young, and when we are old, avoid risk. But we can’t. The absence of risk is the absence of life. The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when you’ve bet it all on red, those are life. Life is struggle. Life is fighting. Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly? Don’t be afraid of risks that aren’t real.

I’ve taken one hell of a lot of risks over the years: some of them senseless, some of them unavoidable, some of them truly nuts, plenty of them for no fathomable reason at all other than just to take them. If I learned anything from it (and I ain’t saying I did), it’s that the most exhilarating experiences in life are usually the result of a risk run and successfully overcome.

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“The biggest voter suppression mechanism in American politics is Hillary Clinton’s personality”

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To know her is to loathe her.

For the entire 40 years of Hillary Clinton’s public life, one thing has been consistent: The less people see of her, the more popular she is.

The Deplorables of Arkansas in the late ’70s, were not thrilled by the snooty feminist from Chicago who refused to take her husband’s name—so she was hidden at the Rose Law Firm where money could be funneled to the Clintons through her supposed legal prowess (a continuing theme).

Before Obamacare became an epithet, the term “HillaryCare” was used to stop the Clinton socialized medicine plan of the 1990s. And if you think that Hillary’s involvement in it didn’t have as much to do with popular rejection of it as its content did, then you weren’t there.

Sure, she won in New York after the Republicans went through a candidate shuffle when Giuliani declined to run (due to personal issues that seem tame today)—but hey, that was New York.

Hillary was the inevitable president in 2008—until people had to contemplate four years of the screech that Rush Limbaugh wickedly said reminded men of their ex-wives, over the dulcet tones of Barack Obama.

And so it goes. When Hillary is in the background, her popularity rises. When she is front and center, it goes down.

Hillary Clinton is right, however, when she says: “I take responsibility for all my decisions, but that’s not why I lost.”

That is correct. You lost because of who you are, not what you did.

Such a nasty woman. If Trump only ever said one perfectly true thing in his entire life, that’s it.

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Wheels, turning

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Bill recommends keeping an eye on this one. If you do, you’ll eventually see chickens, coming home to roost.

President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, plans on traveling to the Ukraine in an attempt to prove it was the Democrat Party, not the GOP, that has illegally conspired with foreign actors.

Two major investigations are plaguing the Democrats. One involves evidence indicating that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign illegally worked with Ukrainians to help Clinton by disclosing damaging information about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Ukrainian President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky will lead the investigation when he takes office in June.

In an interview with the New York Times Friday, Giuliani explained that he’d travel to Ukraine to assure the investigation into Democratic scandal is comprehensive.

“I am going to tell him what I know about the people that are surrounding him, and how important it is to do a full, complete and fair investigation,” the former New York mayor said, referring to Zelensky. “We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do.”

God, I think I just came in my pants a little here. Go get ’em, Rudy. Like a pit bull. Like a fucking boss.

He continued, “And this isn’t foreign policy – I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give the reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

It will be helpful to America, and to its people. Any damage or defeat for the Democrat-Socialists always is.

President Trump insists the Democrats’ involvement in Ukraine is “a major scandal.”

“They even have [Biden] on tape, talking about the prosecutor – and I’ve seen that tape,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News last week. “They have to solve that problem.”

In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Thursday night, Giuliani warned Biden’s family connection to Ukraine is not being investigated because the press is “totally corrupt.”

“The fact is this was a massive collusion between the Democratic National Committee, officials of the Obama administration, Clinton people, and the Ukrainian officials, corrupt officials — who, by the way, were pro-Russian corrupt officials — to create false information about Trump, about Manafort,” he said.

I repeat: go get ’em.




As Bill says: “That smell? It’s a whole bunch of panties suddenly full of loads.” I LOVE that smell. Smells like…victory.

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Uncle Peter, my smelling salts!

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Can we run this woman for president?

Smoke, Drink and Eat What You Want, Norway’s Public Health Minister Says

Why…why…why…that’s OUTRAGEOUS! This is the NYT, so the photo caption you’d expect comes along with it to make sure nobody misses the point:

Sylvi Listhaug, a right-winger, was put in charge of public health after previously resigning as justice minister over comments she made about terrorism.

A “right-winger.” Well, naturally. Say, anybody remember the last time the words “left-winger” appeared in the Times? Anybody?

It was a most unusual message from a health official: People should be allowed to eat, drink and smoke as they see fit.

Norway’s new minister in charge of public health said this week that adults did not need government lectures about what to put in their bodies, but it sounded a bit like she was telling people to go ahead and indulge. Critics protested that her remarks were damaging, particularly coming from someone in her position.

“I think people should be allowed to smoke, drink and eat as much red meat as they like,” Sylvi Listhaug, the government’s minister for the elderly and public health, said in an interview posted on Monday on the website of NRK, Norway’s state broadcaster. “The government may provide information, but I think people in general know what is healthy and what is not.”

They surely do. And free people would be allowed to choose whether to indulge in personal habits, hobbies, and behaviors whether meddlesome government “experts” approve of them or not.

“I fear that this will set public health efforts back for decades, and that this will compromise the general understanding among Norwegians of the health consequences of tobacco and alcohol use,” Anne Lise Ryel, secretary general of Norway’s Cancer Society, said in a statement.

She called for public health to be removed from Ms. Listhaug’s portfolio, saying that “she seems to lack understanding of what public health really means and what her role as minister in that area should be.”

And YOU, Mzx Ryel, definitely lack understanding of what government’s proper role in this area should be.

Ms. Listhaug said that people who smoked felt like “pariahs” in Norway, and that she would not be the “moral police” in government. She echoed comments made by Austria’s far right, defending freedom of choice in opposing antismoking legislation.

The Freedom Party is part of the governing coalition in Austria, and its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, the vice chancellor and minister for sport, is an avid smoker. The party last year blocked rules that would have banned smoking in restaurants, as it commonly is elsewhere in the European Union.

Pardon me for indulging my out-of-control, unhealthy habit of making bad word-play jokes and all, but: what a breath of fresh air this is. The bits I bolded are particularly refreshing.

“Where do we send these smokers in the end?” she asked. “Are they going to have to go into the woods or up on a mountaintop or down to the docks in order just to take a drag?”

Not a problem. Eventually, if the Busybody Left fascists have their way, there’ll be camps set up for that sort of thing.

Via Glenn, who adds: “Given the dreadful — and often deadly — record of government nutrition advice in my lifetime this is entirely sensible.” It is that—just plain old common sense, nothing more. How depressing it is that once commonly-held principles like government restraint and keeping one’s nose well out of other people’s business have come to seem so shocking and outlandish.

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I have a plan…

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A sudden flood of developments in the unraveling of the “Russia Collusion” diversionary hoax and Barr’s counter-investigation, of which I’m going to restrict myself to this one:

Washington attorney Joe diGenova claimed in an interview last night that the Department of Justice inspector general has determined that “the final three FISA extensions were illegally obtained,” and the first one is still being investigated.

For the past year, DOJ IG Michael Horowitz has been investigating the FBI’s 2016 surveillance activities and his report is expected later this month or in early June.

Washington power couple Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing appeared on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business Network show Thursday night to talk about the latest turns in the “SpyGate” saga.

“The only question now is whether or not the first FISA was illegally obtained,” diGenova said.

He told Dobbs that the latest revelations in investigative reporter John Solomon’s piece at The Hill, have prompted further investigation from Horowitz’s team.

Delusional Democrat-Socialists in Congress, still trying to win the 2016 election by any possible means since they failed to via the legitimate one, are now grudgingly moving on to their next wildly desperate gambits. They’re now yammering on about Deutschebank, Trump’s tax returns, bankruptcies, and other financial minutiae. None of that ought to come as a surprise; their mad thirst for power is unslakable, and the failure to remove Trump has maddened them further still.

Glossing over all that for the nonce, though, there’s another point I want to make here. To wit: sooner or later, nauseating as it is to contemplate, Americans will elect another Democrat-Socialist as president. Kinda hard for some of to see, especially afte the Mueller implosion, but there are still plenty of us stupid enough to see it done. When they do, the Republics should—dammit, MUST—see to it that that individual endures THE EXACT SAME treatment as Trump has.

I absolutely, positively mean it: the next Democrat-Socialist president should be harrassed, investigated, accused, and pursued with precisely the same insane vigor as Trump has been. If the GOP retains control of the House at the time, the impeachment-proceeding paperwork should issue from the Juidiciary Committee no later than ten minutes after the inauguration. In any event, rhetoric threats and speculation about impeachment should be unceasing.

The election itself should be assumed to have been fraudulent, its results regarded as tainted. As it happens, Republicans should be doing this anyway, since—given the Democrat-Socialists’ established historical penchant for vote fraud and election-rigging—it’s by no means an unreasonable accusation. But even if whatever corrupt pit-viper the Democrat-Socialists nominate wins all fifty states, the Repukes ought to go ahead and make the accusation anyway…and back it up with some sort of Mueller-type panel to investigate, no matter how long that might take or how badly it might impair President Commiecrat in the performance of his sworn duties.

Conspiracy-theorizing over possible “collusion” with foreign adversaries should begin on inauguration day also, with every last little “suspicious” thread fully unraveled. The president him/her/zhe/zhim/itself should never enjoy a single peaceful hour free of allegation, innuendo, and calumny, however spurious or self-evidently absurd. He should be forced to endure examination so microscopic and minute it would make a veteran proctologist recoil in sheer horror. No stone should be left unturned. After what they’ve done not only to Trump but to his supporters—who, as we well know, are the real targets here—Republicans should damned well see to it that the last American president ever to be allowed to serve a full term reasonably unmolested left office a long, long time ago.

It won’t happen, of course. Even if the handful of Trumpublicans in government were willing to undertake the project, and I ain’t saying they are, the Vichy GOPe would make the welkin ring with their “we’re better than this,” “this is not who we are!” horsepucky, thereby short-circuiting the whole effort. But if we want obnoxious, beyond-the-pale garbage of the sort we’ve had to put up with the last two years to finally stop, giving our Democrat-Socialist enemies a hearty dose of their own medicine might well be the only way to do it. Short of stacking their stinking corpses like cordwood, that is.

Update! Levin puts a big bright line under it.

What ought to happen here is, there ought to be a grand jury impaneled. Comey should give testimony, Andrew McCabe should give testimony, James Baker should give testimony, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, the whole cabal, they all should be giving testimony. They should get a little bit of their own medicine.

We should have a criminal grand jury, and we should have either a Special Counsel or a United States Attorney take charge of this case and get to the bottom of it. Put these people under oath and let them get the Donald Trump treatment. We want all of their documents. No privileges, nothing. Drag them in and maybe drag their kids in too.

What we have here is an attack on the President and an attack on his family. Collusion, Special Counsel, contempt, obstruction, constitutional crisis – I just started writing them down, impeachment, tax returns, bank accounts, they want – they’ve already leaked some of his tax information. They accuse him of campaign violations. They accuse him being a racist and anti-Semite, mentally unfit for office.

Let me tell you what’s going on. This is a Democrat Party cabal, trying to reverse the 2016 election, trying to disenfranchise 63 million voters, mostly Republicans, independents and some Democrats, led by a Speaker of the House from San Francisco, a Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from New York, the Chairman of the Oversight Committee from Baltimore.

And they maybe will have special counsels against them, because if they want to use Soviet tactics against Republicans, then the only way the Democrats know to stop is if Soviet tactics are used against them. That’s it.

From your lips to God’s ears, Mark. As Picard used to say: Make it so.

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State religion

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Hey, anybody remember that whole “establishment of religion” thing, formerly one of the most fearsome of the Left’s many bugaboos? “No prayer in schools,” a “wall of separation between church and state” that simply HAD to be iron-clad and inviolable?

Nah, me neither.

A religious liberty advocacy group is threatening to slap a Seattle-area school district with a lawsuit claiming the district has urged teachers to bless Muslim students in Arabic during the holy month of Ramadan and give them preferential treatment, including skipping tests.

The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF) claims the Dieringer School District is officially endorsing Islam and is following a script by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that urges schools to make special accommodations for Muslim students and to wish them “Ramadan Mubarak,” which means “Happy Ramadan,” or “Ramadan Kareem,” which means “Have a generous Ramadan.”

The CAIR guidelines also instruct teachers to monitor Muslim students fasting and suggests teachers not schedule any tests on the Islamic holidays of Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha.

“By urging teachers to bless Muslim students in Arabic, the district is running roughshod over the First Amendment’s mandate of government neutrality toward religion,” said Daniel Piedra, FCDF’s executive director. “A school district would never order teachers to ‘welcome’ Catholic students during Easter with ‘He is risen, alleluia!’ Singling out Muslim students for special treatment is blatantly unconstitutional.”

The defense fund claims Dieringer Superintendent Judy Martinson blindly followed the recommendations of CAIR and “enacted the letter as official district policy.” The defense fund sent Martinson a letter stating their complaints after a teacher and parent complained about the new procedure.

Did she, or didn’t she? Martinson denies it, flatly saying “The Dieringer School District has not and would not violate the First Amendment by endorsing any religious observations.” Then again:

Fox News also has obtained a March 14 email from Martinson’s official account to district officials including school principals, forwarding a CAIR letter with suggested guidelines for schools.

As you would expect, the terrorist front group’s leader pounced on the opportunity to whine about “Islamophobia” with his usual alacrity.

Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, told Fox News the pushback from FCDF was a “sign of the growing Islamophobia in our nation that showing respect for and accommodating the religious traditions of Muslim students could result in punitive legal action.”

Yeah, whatever, go fuck yourself. Here’s another step down the same dark road:

A Philadelphia city commission said Monday it’s investigating an event last month at which Muslim children were captured on video speaking in Arabic about beheadings and the liberation of Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site.

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations launched a probe into the April 17 gathering at the Muslim American Society’s Philadelphia chapter. A video uploaded to the chapter’s Facebook page shows children moving to a revolutionary anthem often used by Islamist groups, and two young girls reading from a prepared text. One says, “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The Muslim American Society took the video down — calling the video “disturbing” and condemning the words used in it — and said a school that rented space in the building was responsible for the program. It said the person in charge of the event had been dismissed.

The society also called the school, which it did not name, a “separate entity.” But old Facebook posts that have since been taken down show that a school called MAS Leaders Academy operates at the Muslim American Society’s Philadelphia location. Muslim American Society officials did not return phone calls and email messages seeking comment Monday on the relationship between the Philadelphia chapter and the school.

Yeah, I just bet they didn’t at that. No one needs to waste any time wondering why the jihadi infiltrators might have picked Philly and Seattle—two overwhelmingly liberal-majority cities—for the latest examples of this gradual, drip-drip-drip insinuation into the very fabric of American life.

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The Tucker Revolution

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Tuckernaught? Tuckpocalypse? Carlsnarok? Okay, okay, I’ll stop now.

Tucker Carlson’s cable-tv show begins identically each night. After the words “Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight”—always intoned and inflected exactly the same way—the host launches into an opening monologue on the news of the day, or what he thinks ought to be the news of the day.

On January 2, 2019, though, there was no news. So Carlson used the holiday lull to deliver a non-stop, 15-minute, 2,571-word evisceration of America’s ruling class—political, industrial, financial, intellectual, and cultural. Our rulers, he insisted, had failed at their ostensible tasks: to improve the health of the country and the lives of its citizens.

The show is usually leavened throughout with puckish humor. Not that night; Carlson was deadly serious. He laid at the feet of our ruling class a devastating litany of failure: the destruction of the family, skyrocketing out-of-wedlock births, the opioid crisis, rampant male unemployment, the sleazy effort to anesthetize the dispossessed with payday loans and pot, increasing financialization and techification of the economy and resultant wealth concentration, and foreign war without purpose, strategy, victory, or end.

But have our rulers really failed? Not if one understands, Carlson explained, that their real aim is to enrich themselves and maintain their power: “We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”

Within a day or two, the speech had gone viral. Friend and enemy alike referred to it simply as “Tucker’s Monologue.” Everyone knew instantly which was meant. To those sympathetic, here was a quasi-Trumpist rallying cry not merely for a new Right, but also for millions of apolitical Americans who feel—rightly—abandoned, even preyed upon, by the status quo. By contrast, those opposed sensed a clear danger: a message that—unlike the stale tenets of Republican-study-group, think-tank conservatism—might actually have a chance of inspiring and creating a new majority.

He’s certainly iconoclastic now. The ways in which he breaks—on his nightly show and in bestselling book, Ship of Fools—with the rightist iron triangle of Republican politicians, conservative donors, and the magazine-think tank industrial complex are legion.

Why is capital taxed at half the rate of labor, Carlson asks, and is manifestly unsatisfied by the conventional Right’s answer that “investment” is necessary for “growth and innovation.” What good are the latter, he further asks, if all their gains accrue to a narrowing upper slice while those taxed double for working (assuming they can find jobs) can’t afford to share in the supposed glories of late-stage capitalism?

Why are we still making trade deals, three decades (at least) into a manufacturing decline that has devastated entire American industries and hollowed out many of our communities, all the while enriching some of our most determined foes? Why do our politicians insist on getting us into wars we not only can’t win but for which they can’t even define victory?

Above all, why—at a population of 330 million and climbing, with as many as 22 million here illegally—do our elites refuse to do anything whatsoever to control our borders? Indeed, why do they thwart, at every turn, President Trump on this very issue and attack anyone who speaks up for any limit on immigration whatsoever?

What, specifically, changed the mind of the formerly bow-tied boy-Buckley (or as a friend put it to me, “typical conservative dorkwad”) and launched Carlson toward becoming the leading light of a new conservative movement?

That’s just the opening of a Michael Anton review and analysis which, while lengthy, is a rockin’ good read nonetheless. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is the unvarnished glee with which Anton recounts (and skewers) the Old Guard’s sniffy condescension towards Carlson:

Within a day of Tucker’s Monologue, the “Right” rallied—not of course to denounce the decidedly unconservative trends Carlson complained about, but to attack Carlson himself. “Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot,” Carlson had said. Right on cue, as if to trumpet their idiocy, in rushed a platoon of policy wonks to defend the sanctity of markets and explain why creative destruction should and must apply every bit as much to people, families, and societies as it did to the buggy whip industry.

Bret Stephens devoted an entire column to riffing on a Monty Python movie, as if Carlson’s meaning were such a joke no serious refutation was warranted. (Then why devote an entire column to it?) It’s worth noting that the proffered catalogue of elite beneficence—“capital financing, deregulation, access to global markets, a stable and predictable regulatory and legal environment, IRAs and 401(k)s, talented immigrants, global cities, good food, universities that are the envy of the world, record-making growth and a world in which there’s almost no chance of my children being conscripted to fight a war”—while no doubt offered with utmost sincerely, reads like self-parody.

“The Right should reject Tucker Carlson’s victimhood populism” whinged David French, who, when not exploring a presidential campaign, never misses an opportunity to moralistically lambaste those to his right.

Later, Anton merrily deals out equally resounding slaps upside the empty heads of bewildered, hapless cucks Max Boot and Bill Kristol. Like I said, it’s a long piece, but stick with it to the end. It’s a sheer delight to read, brim-full of penetrating insight, clear-eyed analysis, and a bunch of good, toothsome lines to boot.

(Via Steyn)

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TINVOWOOT

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And TINTOWOut, either.

It’s certainly wonderful to think that “all we need to do is find ways to constructively disagree with each other,” and think that this would solve most, if not all, of our problems. But there’s a tremendous difficulty with applying this to the modern ideological divide between Right and Left, the “reactionary” (true or otherwise) and the progressive. The difficulties lie in that this line of thinking implies that there are two sides which actually want rational discussion and a settling of differences rationally. Yet, there are not.

Indeed, what the Left wants is precisely the opposite of this. The progressive Left has not, does not, and never will seek some sort of accommodation with its ideological enemies. Instead, the Left seeks to acquire for itself the institutional and social power to silence its enemies. Ultimately, this proclivity stems from the very nature of what drives the “progressive idea,” which is that the “arc of history” is always bending towards the advancement of what the Left believes is “progress.” Since this trend is inexorable, there is no need, ultimately, to compromise with the Right, merely find various ways to outlast them and hasten their demise. This sort of thinking is responsible for everything from doxxing to the gulags and explains why progressivism is the single greatest evil that this world has ever seen.

At the risk of sounding like a progressive myself, one of the overarching problems with the modern world – which includes the worldview of the “classically liberal, libertarian” soft centre – is that it still holds onto essentially bourgeois attitudes about social and civic participation. These attitudes include notions of fair play, the “marketplace of ideas,” approaching consensus through reasonable discussion and the free and open exchange of ideas, and so forth. To the average American and Westerner, these all sound like pretty straightforward goals.

But they are not goals which the progressive Left shares. Indeed, the Left has absolutely no desire to see a “free and open exchange of ideas” because when that happens, they lose. When stacked against virtually any alternative, progressivism has a horrible track record, and deep down inside they know this. This is why they spend so much effort using institutional power to suppressed dissenters from their orthodoxy.  It’s why when they do appear to be engaging with ideological competitors, it nearly always takes the form of screaming about “fascism,” “racism,” or some other slur designed to signal to their fellows the presence of an enemy, much like the moaning of a brain-dead zombie in a horror movie.

From the progressive Left/SJW perspective, there is literally NO advantage to actually having open and honest dialogue with those on the Right about any topic, and especially not with the genuine-but-currently-dissident Right. They know that when they engage us in the “marketplace of ideas,” they lose. All that can happen for them is to see defections from their ranks and to lose their grip on institutional power. So why would they ever accede to an open exchange build about “rules of fairness,” if they don’t have to?

The short answer is, “they won’t.” So why would we ever expect them to?

The short answer is: we shouldn’t. The longer answer is: we MUSTN’T. Rather, we should concern ourselves exclusively and entirely with smiting them, crushing them, defeating them utterly. At each and every opportunity we can find or contrive. No quarter, no mercy, no remorse. Nothing less can suffice. What they intend for us is neither benign nor tolerable, and no stratagem or tactic is beyond them in the pursuit of their sinister goal. Full stop, end of story.

Via Gerard, who appends a Tweet that fleshes the whole thing out quite nicely.

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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." – Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil." - Skeptic

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