Hmmm… – Cold Fury

As intended

Posted on 12/4/201812/4/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

Guys, we gotta stop harping on the “failure” of socialism. Truth is, it works the way it’s really supposed to every time it’s tried.

To say California is a mess is an understatement. We on the Right often assume this is due to incompetence. And while I acknowledge that possibility, I ask my readers to entertain an alternative: this is quite probably intentional.

On Drudge this morning, I found a brief snippet about Jack Ma, richest man in China, being a member of the Communist party. Does this surprise you? Communism has never been a ground-up, grassroots movement from the lower classes, despite the popular reputation as such. Rather, it is an ideology led by the second-tier wealthy scions who fancy themselves to be intellectuals.

Marxists merely presume to use the lower classes against their enemies in the middle and upper classes. Ultimately, they don’t want to deal with the dirty, teeming masses in their living rooms, or even their zip codes. Socialists have had the run of California since the early 90s, and yet their vision has resulted in the second-highest poverty rate in the United States (adjusted for cost-of-living – something Leftists rarely bother with).

Socialism is Feudalism repackaged and rebranded as some peasant-friendly, wonderful ideology of plenty.

In reality it’s California writ large. It is haves and have-nots… with a lot more have-nots than haves. It is starvation for the masses and cake (hey, you can have it AND eat it too) for the experts. It is maximal separation between those that do and those that pretend to think. Leftists tell us that Capitalism is to blame for all this, and yet how can that be when, where they rule, there is greater separation, greater inequality?

I don’t pretend to care overmuch about relative wealth. There will always be haves and have-nots. Yet they do make mouth noises about this, then do the exact opposite. We are accustomed to calling them hypocrites, assuming that the mistake is accidental, a consequence of hubris, perhaps, or merely of ignorance. Consider the possibility that it is intentional, that this is what they wanted all along, and all the mouth-noises about the proletariat is just a cloaking device for sending us back to the age of Feudalism and rule by nobility – without even the courtesy of noblesse oblige this time around.

Y’know, I think he might be onto something here.

(Via the Woodpile Report)

No going back

Posted on 11/24/201811/24/2018 by Mike

TL proposes a first step.

From a rational point of view, there is no way ever to get back even one scintilla of freedom or liberty. No matter how hard we vote, no matter how outraged and screaming we get, there is NO way to ever return to a semblance of liberty and freedom. It cannot happen. Not in this system. Not with this debt. Not with the contempt of every government official toward our rights, property and privacy.

It is time, then, to draft a Petition of Dissolution. Our friends on the left will be as willing to do so as those on the right. The things of government are unmanageable; it is too corrupt; too trapped by its own arrogance; too divisive in its manner to listen to reason or work to solve the nations problems. This government created over two hundred years ago is no longer capable of working as designed. It cannot even obey its own codes. There are laws for government officials and other laws for citizens. There are few if any actual punishments of government employees, while every word is a potential prison sentence for the citizen. The republic has become some sort of kingless Kingdom with only barons, lords and sheriffs running amok, demanding satisfaction for their whims.

We can look at fault if we want to, but does it matter? Is anything more clear than the fact that this government is not capable of understanding how ridiculous it is when it speaks of laws for one citizen and different laws for others? That special groups can murder, maim and rape children and others will be tried and imprisoned for the same actions? That is a system that has FAILED. There is no other way to view its actions or its reasons. A judge in one circuit overrules the President?

I know that by suggesting a Petition of Dissolution that it is exactly what George Soros wants. It is what the communists in the federal government want. But the trap has already been set to slowly grind resistance to these groups into dust. The push to disarm the citizenry will only get more insistent and resistance to it more fractured and distanced as time goes on. Each city will enact illegal confiscations and then states and little by little all rights will be lost. The Second Amendment is the only one that matters at a time like this.

Now, while the greatest majority still hold the weapons of resistance, is the time to dissolve this union no matter how difficult it is for the heart to conceive it. The alternative is an inexorable decline into misery, destitution and ultimate ignoble slavery. It is our right and duty to alter or abolish. It is the only thing left to which we should swear an oath. I don’t know what is on the other side of such an act, perhaps the exact same outcome, but with the knowledge that we stood and we gave everything to deny the tyrants their victory. But, maybe something better…after the worst.

I still can’t see this as remotely likely; should such a thing be undertaken, FedGovCo will certainly quash it with a quickness anyway. But TL is absolutely right about that “right and duty” business; the Founders spelled that out in no uncertain terms for us. To wit:

…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…

Which brings us ’round to this:

If one thinks about how America’s cold civil war could be resolved, there seem to be only five possibilities. One would be to change the political subject. Ronald Reagan used to say that when the little green men arrive from outer space, all of our political differences will be transcended and humanity will unite for the first time in human history. Similarly, if some jarring event intervenes—a major war or a huge natural calamity—it might reset our politics.

A second possibility, if we can’t change the subject, is that we could change our minds. Persuasion, or some combination of persuasion and moderation, might allow us to end or endure our great political division. Perhaps one party or side will persuade a significant majority of the electorate to embrace its Constitution, and thus win at the polling booth and in the legislature. For generations, Republicans have longed for a realigning election that would turn the GOP into America’s majority party. This remains possible, but seems unlikely.

As for moderating our disagreements and learning to live with them more or less permanently, that too seems unlikely given their fundamental nature and the embittered trajectory of our politics over the last two decades.

So if we won’t change our minds, and if we can’t change the subject, we are left with only three other ways out of the cold civil war. The happiest of the three would be a vastly reinvigorated federalism. One of the original reasons for constitutional federalism was that the states had a variety of interests and views that clashed with one another and could not be pursued in common. If we had a re-flowering of federalism, some of the differences between blue states and red states could be handled discreetly by the states themselves. The most disruptive issues could be denationalized. The problem is, having abandoned so much of traditional federalism, it is hard to see how federalism could be revived at this late juncture.

That leaves two possibilities. One, alas, is secession, which is a danger to any federal system—something about which James Madison wrote at great length in The Federalist Papers. With any federal system, there is the possibility that some states will try to leave it. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have gone their separate ways peacefully, just within the last generation. But America is much better at expansion than contraction. And George Washington’s admonitions to preserve the Union, I think, still miraculously somehow linger in our ears. So secession would be extremely difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that it could lead, as we Americans know from experience, to the fifth and worst possibility: hot civil war.

Under present circumstances, the American constitutional future seems to be approaching some kind of crisis—a crisis of the two Constitutions. Let us pray that we and our countrymen will find a way to reason together and to compromise, allowing us to avoid the worst of these dire scenarios—that we will find, that is, the better angels of our nature.

Unlikely in the extreme, since the nature of the Left—hungering to enslave all Americans under an all-powerful federal tyranny of exactly the stripe the Founders dreaded and abhorred most—allows for no “better angels.” We’ll just have to see how it all plays out, for better or worse.

Breaking bad

Posted on 11/10/201811/10/2018 by Mike

Claremont’s The American Mind is thinking about Trump.

After almost three years, American progressives and the conservative Never Trumpers are no closer to understanding the man and the political situation he’s helped to create than they ever were. If we wish to make some progress in understanding him and the state of the country, we need to start from a different point of view.

Good character remains more desirable and honorable than bad character—even if bad character does not necessarily make for a bad president, nor good character for a good president. Based on his critics’ account of him, the question about Trump would seem to be, at least from the conservative point of view: how comes such a bad man to do so much good? That is, is it really the case, as the Never Trumpers’ minor premise asserts, that Trump is such a bad man? So bad that it was morally imperative to usher Hillary Clinton to the White House in his stead?

I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s line about the socialist Stafford Cripps: “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” The Never Trumpers see no virtues in Trump, and admire none of his vices. The resulting portrait is a caricature, a rough, unrevealing one. No one would ever call him a moral paragon—not even the president himself. But the Trump universe theorized by the Never Trumpers is all dark matter; it doesn’t acknowledge the traits we see with our own eyes, including some admirable vices, but also his distinctive virtues, whether we choose to dislike them or not. The critics seem to prefer an explanation of Trump that is, as the cosmologists say, non-luminous.

Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future (2004) is a short book with a useful distinction that begins to illuminate the phenomenon of Trump. It describes two countries, as it were. “Hard America” is shaped by the marketplace forces of competition and accountability. “Soft America” is the realm of public schools, self-esteem, and government social programs. The latter, according to Barone, produces incompetent and unambitious 18-year-olds, the former hard-charging and adaptable 30-year-olds. Somehow, uneasily, modern America includes both.

Donald Trump considers himself a kind of ambassador from hard America to soft America. Many (not all) of the asperities of his character are related to his career path. He calls himself “a builder,” and America “a nation of builders.” He knows his way around a construction site, and his virtues and vices skew to that hard, brazen, masculine world of getting things built quickly, durably, beautifully if possible, and in any case profitably. He wants to revive hard America’s mines, factories, and building sites, in the face of what he knows is the growing power of its despisers in soft America.

Trump also knows his way around a television studio. The hard reality of being a builder and landlord is combined, in his case, with being a longstanding reality-TV star. If the preceding president cast himself in the role of “no-drama” Obama, the current one plays all-drama-all-the-time Trump. From the beginning his kind of real estate verged on show business. Branding and selling his name, which have constituted the largest part of his business for a while, represented for him another step in the direction of show business. Show business is a business, however, and Trump likes to interpret what might be considered the softer side of his career in the hardest possible terms. He emphasizes numbers—the ratings, the advertising dollars, the size of his crowds. He has survived in several cutthroat industries, and intends to add politics to the list.

Whether in business or in politics, Trump disliked the airs and claims of “experts,” detached from and above the subjects of their experiments. He distrusted their glibness, too. He identified with working men and women, and promised (at least) to add jobs, to boost economic growth, to “win” for pipe-fitters and waitresses, too. He defended their Social Security but blasted the fraud of Obamacare, whereas Romney had scorned the 47%’s “entitlements” but gave Obamacare (based, you may recall, on Romneycare) a pass. Romney lacked perhaps what Kanye West would call “dragon energy.” When in a primary election he had done well among voters without a high school degree, Trump memorably declared, “I love the poorly educated.” You’d never hear Romney, nor any other mainstream Republican, say that!

These are but a few of the character traits that add up to make Trump, love him or hate him, one of our greatest and most accomplished Presidents—after not even two years in office. This is a long but REALLY good article, which serves as a springboard for several AmMind articles also taking a deeper look at Trump—including this one:

It is a testimony to the sanctimonious humorlessness of our elites that they still don’t find Trump funny. He has an undeniable knack for coming up with catchy, biting nicknames. No amount of Red Bull will ever help poor Jeb shed his “Low Energy” moniker. And who can hear Elizabeth Warren’s name and not think of Pocahontas? (Trump didn’t coin that one, but he definitely made it stick).

Though the political value of a sense of humor is considerably underappreciated, it is not, at the end of day, a great virtue. Courage is though. And here Kesler does not fully give Trump his due. He only ascribes to him “a kind of courage in defense of one’s own.” Trump, in fact, is manly. And it is his manliness, more so than his other qualities, his fame or his views that accounts for his popularity and his success — and makes up for his shortcomings and missteps.

Trump’s manliness is not that of a soldier who risks his life in combat or of a general who leads men into battle. In this regard, he is not as manly as his Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis. Trump’s manliness is that of a man who is not afraid to say out loud what others only whisper and to incur the wrath of the ruling class for doing so. Trump is more manly than Mattis in this regard (and to almost any politician in recent memory, for that matter: if Mitt Romney had displayed half of Trump’s courage in 2012, he probably would have been President).

I don’t think it much matters to anybody whether Trump is “more manly” than Mattis—least of all, probably, to the two of them. In fact, the combination of attributes we used to call “manliness” shouldn’t be placed in some hierarchy according to which is the greater; one is either manly or, increasingly these days, one is not. No, courage on the battlefield isn’t quite the same as the courage required to stare down a powerful opponent across a boardroom table before cutting him to pieces in a hardnosed, high-stakes business negotation. But courage they both certainly are, I’d say, with their own distinct virtues and prospective pitfalls. And both are extremely valuable, and ought to be encouraged rather than denigrated.

We all know what we are not allowed to say in America. Every week brings a reminder of what happens to those who deviate from the accepted script when speaking of any of the Left’s protected identity groups. The state, it is true, does not criminalize hate speech, but public opinion does censor it. Heretics are not imprisoned — they are fired, disgraced and declared untouchable.

Not surprisingly, immigration has been Trump’s signature issue. He not only says what he isn’t supposed to say — “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best” — he doesn’t back down when the elites unleash their fury against him for saying it. In fact, he usually doubles down — “Mexico is forcing people in that they don’t want, and they want us to take care of those people.”

By challenging the reigning consensus on immigration and not bowing to the pressure to recant, Trump teaches his countrymen a lesson in courage. Americans see in Trump a man willing to take on the elites who scorn them and to not only withstand their attacks but to fight back — often successfully. Trump doesn’t just punch — as he likes to say, he counterpunches.

Okay, enough of the excerpting, although I could easily go on and on with this one too. Just read all of the both of ’em.

Bombtroversy: Mitt blows up!

Posted on 10/26/201810/26/2018 by Mike

Of course you all know by now about the Bombgate fizzle (sorry), about which I don’t know how much worthwhile I really have to add.
Thankfully, Steyn takes his commentary in a quite unexpected direction.

Me yesterday:

I shall hold off further comment until more facts are known.

No such circumspection stayed Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney, who reacted instantly to the “suspicious packages” mailed to the Clintons, Obama, George Soros, CNN and others, and weighed in with boundless confidence:

Hate acts follow hate speech. It is past time for us to turn down and tune out the rabid rhetoric.

This is a nitwit statement even by Mitt’s recent standards, and doubtless a preview of the role he intends to play in the Senate. It is also an object lesson in the perils of Tweet-speed insight. “Moderate” “reasonable” “centrists”, like all other politicians, should take a deep breath and be mindful of the old adage: Don’t just say something, stand there.

Is it true that “hate acts follow hate speech”? To lazy types like, alas, “severely conservative” Republican Senate candidates, the logic is self-evident.

Let us stipulate that we live in awful, vulgar, witless hyper-partisan times. Does instant stupid mouthing-off on the Internet encourage violence? There’s just as much evidence that it’s a safety valve: Just as “sexting” seems to have replaced sex for large numbers of people, so venting seems to function as a violence substitute: Hey, let’s get that guy and string him up on the edge of town! Er, actually, I was thinking I’d just Tweet that he’s a f**ktard douchebag in capital letters, and then watch “Carpool Karaoke” before turning in…

I have had some small distant connection with letter bombs. They are an inefficient way of dispatching your enemies, which is why for high-profile assassinations the IRA preferred placing actual bombs in situ themselves: They did not trust the murders of, say, Lord Mountbatten, Sir Anthony Berry, Ian Gow, Robert Bradford and Airey Neave to the vagaries of the Royal Mail. Setting aside their unreliability, in the over-entouraged political culture of contemporary America there is zero chance of a letter bomb to a former president finding its target. Or even to Maxine Waters.

Sending multiple bombs that will never reach their targets is an ineffective way to kill former presidents, vice-presidents, cabinet secretaries and movie stars…but it’s such an ingenious way to “hijack the debate” that you’d almost think that was its purpose.

Whether or not that proves to be so, the pile-on by Democrats and media these last twenty-four hours confirms they’re happy to co-opt it as such: Pipe bombs? You deplorables need to pipe down.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Most telling? That Hillary!™, after having been sent one of these not-remotely-explosive devices, went ahead with her Florida appearance anyway, without batting an eyelash. A profile in courage, an example of fearlessness from a true leader? Sorry, no sale; I can’t see her going out there to make an entirely pointless appearance unless she was already confident she was in no danger. This sounds a lot more like it to me:

Somehow it is all too convenient, this “October surprise”. None of the named targets were really in danger, although others could have been hurt touching, picking up, or opening a package. The same could not be said when a Bernie Sanders supporter showed up at a baseball field in Alexandria determined to kill Republicans.

Back then we weren’t supposed to link that individual with the rhetoric of Sanders and other Democrats who warned that if the Republican agenda was enacted, millions would die.

As the liberals rise up in righteous condemnation of Trump’s “toxic” rhetoric, we will be asked to forget Rep. Maxine Waters’ call for nonstop harassment of GOP players, of key Republicans being hounded out of restaurants, confronted in elevators and even in their offices and at their homes. We will be asked to forget the violent riots on college campuses to keep conservative speakers from speaking.

Of course, rhetoric does not justify a response with explosive violence, yet, as noted, for a so-called domestic terrorist attack, this scattering of suspicious packages seems too lame, too ineffective, too conveniently timed and doesn’t really pass the smell test, at least according to Rush Limbaugh…

The packages may be found to be a real threat from an obviously unbalanced individual or individuals, but it may very well also be a false flag designed to reaffirm the Democrats’ continuous slander against the GOP.

If I was a gambling man, I know which way I’d bet. Which, I have to say I’m not prepared to flatly state that I believe, absolutely and unshakeably, that this “bomb” scare was nothing more than a Democrat Socialist hoax, intended as a distraction before an election that looks more and more like ending up a drubbing for them of biblical proportions. That said, the question is: cui bono?

That question is a bit more complicated now that this hamfisted, inept fiasco appears to have blown up in their faces like all their other get-Trump buffoonery has. Hamfisted, inept buffoonery has become something of a trademark for them at this point—which hasn’t kept them from plodding right on anyway, stepping on one Sideshow-Bob rake after another. Ludicrous and over-the-top as it is, this could well be just the latest example. As Walsh says:

Left to their own devices, they’d be howling in the wilderness. But the media endorses and amplifies what otherwise would be their inchoate rage by constantly reinforcing, in ways both subtle and blatant, the narrative that the country has been illegitimately seized by reactionary forces who prevented Merrick Garland from cementing a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, then deprived the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua from her rightfully ordained rest in the Lincoln Bedroom, and now are rolling back social-justice gains that should have been legislated for all eternity. As I wrote in this space last week: they’re losing, and they know they’re losing.

They’re losing, they’re desperate, they’re clueless, and they’re incompetent. They’re also treacherous, amoral, corrupt, and shameless. It’s hardly unreasonable, then, to be extremely skeptical of this almost vaudevillian “bomb scare,” nor to suspect a Democrat-Socialist hand behind the curtain. If the whole story suddenly vanishes from MSM coverage in a week or two like Muslim terrorist attacks usually do nowadays, that’ll tell us all we need to know.

But in a sense, it doesn’t matter anyway. A genie has been let out of its bottle, and there ain’t no putting it back.

Democrats and their media allies have sanctioned violence against Republicans. They’ve defended harassment and even assaults as activism. They have embraced and celebrated hate groups. The mob culture they have brought forth is fundamentally changing the rules of American politics.

The alleged bombs should open a dialogue about the degree to which violence has become the currency of our politics. But instead the media will offer up the same tired talking points that ignore the violence of its side, while pretending that the culture of political violence in the last two years began yesterday.

It did not.

Once political terror is unleashed, it can’t be controlled or compartmentalized.

Leftists, who have written a bloody history of political terror from Europe to South America, from the Middle East and across Asia, and right back to America, ought to know that better than anyone else.

The Left has made it its mission to destroy America. This is what destroying a country looks like.

In Europe, in Russia, in Asia and in Latin America, leftist revolutions unleashed civil wars of unimaginable brutality in which ordinary men committed horrifying crimes because every norm of decency had been destroyed. The hour came when sides no longer mattered; there was no right or wrong, just murder.

The mad toll of death threats and assaults, of shootings and harassment was unleashed by the Left. The hectoring media has made millions from it. Fortunes have poured into the war chests of radical Democrats. They can make it stop. Or they can go on feeding the beast while blaming conservatives.

Once again, I know which way I’d bet. Meanwhile, the filthy Democrat Socialist scum are doubling down on making political hay out of their debacle. Exhibit A:

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) published a video on Thursday placing the blame for the bomb threats to her office — and to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — squarely on President Donald Trump’s shoulders, despite his clear and repeated condemnation of the attacks. Waters avoided any mention of her own efforts to incite protest, or the similar statements from Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Cory Booker.

“I think the president of the United States should take responsibility over the kind of violence that we’re seeing for the first time in different ways,” Waters declared in the video. “I think the president of the United States has been dog-whistling to his constituency, making them believe that their problems are caused by those people over there.”

The congresswoman argued that the perpetrators “are acting out what they believe the president wants them to do and the way that he wants them to act.”

Okay, I’m just gonna come right out and say it here: if the purpose behind the bombs HAD been to take Waters and the other pusbags out (doubtful), AND THEY HAD SUCCEEDED, I can’t honestly say I’d have been plunged into paroxysms of inconsolable grief over it. They’ve been attacking us for years now, again and again. They’ve followed up not by strongly, unequivocally condemning the perpetrators, but by continuing to incite them and then blaming Trump and/or Repubs for it. When directly called out on their brazen incitement, they either blithely ignore it, lie about it, or, again, blame the Right for it.

They’re only “concerned” about violence when they’re on the receiving end; the only time they bother to demand “civility” is when their own tactics get turned against them. Bottom line: the Democrat Socialist Party is A-okay with politically-motivated violence, as long as they’re the ones committing it. Violence is just another tool in the Left’s box, one they claim an absolute and exclusive right to use.

They are unalterably committed, heart, body, soul, and mind, to grinding this country under the Marxist heel. They arrogate to themselves an absolute right to rule, without reference to or regard for the consent of the ruled. They now have no tack to take, no other option left to them but violence. They will use it as and when it suits them, and do so gleefully, with neither reservation nor remorse.

They are utterly despicable, and they must be stopped.

Unhittable

Posted on 10/18/201810/18/2018 by Mike

Neo swings for the fences, jacks it out of the park.

During the primaries, Trump’s Republican opponents never quite figured out how to wrestle this particular alligator. In the time since he’s been president, some of the Republican NeverTrumpers are still going at it and failing, although most have given up the agon and praised him, albeit sometimes reluctantly. Now it’s the Democrats who are engaged in a struggle with this strange opponent, continually thinking “Gotcha!!” and continually being bested.

Which brings me to another metaphor, appropriate for this time of year: Trump as knuckleballer. The knuckleball pitcher confounds batters with the zaniness of the ball’s behavior once it leaves his hand. It doesn’t require extreme force but it’s not an easy pitch to throw and it’s a very difficult one to control. But it can make ordinarily good hitters look bad; they often just can’t figure out what’s going on, and they end up looking silly when they swing at a knuckler.

I think she’s onto something here. As the lady says, the knuckleball is very damned difficult to master, and at any given time there aren’t very many pitchers in the Bigs using it. My dad could throw one, as it happens, and I remember as a kid him trying to teach me to do it and getting absolutely nowhere with it. But the ones that CAN throw one…well, how would YOU like to try hitting this?

No wonder the Dems have gone bugfuck nuts, eh? If you were accustomed your whole career to underhand-slowpitch gravy balls, and then one day found yourself having to flail the bat around at this stuff instead, you’d flip your lid too.

Decline is a choice

Posted on 10/18/201810/18/2018 by Mike

From the comments, in response to this post: Aesop on the dismal state of Christianity.

“Well-meaning people of faith” are the entire reason there’s a culture war, because they’ve gone all French on it for more than half a century. All they want to know is who they can surrender to so all those unpleasant things will just stop.

So, how’s that neutrality and appeasement thing workin’ out for ya, Mrs. Politics is Icky and Mr. Art Is For Fairies? Has running away and jamming your head in the sand up to your shoulders helped turn Hollywierd around, since you abandoned it to the Leftards somewhere around Eisenhower’s first term? How’s music working for you since you burned those demon Elvis records, and retreated to your churchianity muzak, where Jesus is your boyfriend and God’s your fishin’ buddy? No “Onward Christian Soldiers” for you lot, it’s all the women swooning about how your former savior really came down to be like Oprah, but with more empathy and cars for the audience. And you’re stunned when you look around and realize that other than the pale limp-wristed minister, the church is full of your fellow cat ladies and children still too small to escape on their own, while all the pitifully few men there formerly have drifted off to watch NASCAR and football, and can’t stand five minutes in a church with everything feminine from the music to the message, and probably even including lace doilies on the pew armrests, and pink satin dust ruffles on the kneeling benches.

Peter and Paul told Roman emperors to shove their self-declared deity where the sun don’t shine. Daniel stood triumphant among a den of lions. You folks in the same circumstances would be wondering which flavor of cat food to bring along.

While a few orthodox preaqchers try to stem the tide, they’re overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of soft-headed soft-hearted peace-at-any-price appeasement mongers, more worried about not sticking out too much from the culture than about grabbing by the horns and bulldogging it into submission to timeless precepts of morality and righteousness.

A generation moving into your leadership has been entirely raised by pussified men, or worse, in single-parent fatherless households, because you decided better to cater to single mothers with daddy issues than to stand athwart the culture and yell “Stop!”, and demand that the men among you lead that effort, so you’ve lost the men you had, the up and coming ones can’t run out the doors fast enough, and the women you’ve kept are the ones no one else wants. And after three failed marriages apiece, that’s not a guess, or a slam, it’s a description of the problem.

You don’t know what to do with the three young men who haven’t left yet, one of the three is gay, the old men who still come are mainly there because they give the old biddies someone to tend to, and if you even reach out to the men from 20-70, it stops at 1PM Sunday, and maybe includes pancakes once a week.

You don’t have to reach out to the women, because 98% of everything you do day in and day out is geared to them.
If your church has ten men worthy of the appellation you’re church is in the top 0.5% of all of them nationwide, and if anybody’s house was on fire, in most cases, you couldn’t find enough manpower that was literally men to even staff a decent bucket brigade, let alone tackle anything more serious.

And whoever’s leading worship never served in the military, probably hasn’t done anything resembling hard physical labor his entire life, and hasn’t lifted anything heavier than a Bible or a pencil since his teens. Jesus was a carpenter when that work meant everything from cutting down the tree to turning it into lumber to hand-powered tool and joinery; he’d beat Bob Villa into the ground with one arm tied behind his back. He recruited his help from among fishermen and roughnecks down at the docks. He hung around with prostitutes and guys who cursed like sailors, because they were sailors, and those people enjoyed his company.
If your pastor or minister hung around a tavern near the wharf for half an hour, he’d probably die of fright, and if he, (or God forbid, she) tried to convince so much as one of them to stick around, let alone follow him, they wouldn’t expect to get as far as the men’s room without needing to ask for help.

So it’s not fair to blame the church for lacking anything like drive, vision, energy, or muscularity in dealing with the culture. The church has been acting like a bunch of women for 50-100 years, because that’s all it is, most days in most places. Most average boys figure out by 16 or so that there’s no place for them, they’re not wanted, and that their input will be unwelcome, so they self-select out the door and into sports, cars, partying, work, the military, or just about anything else, because they aren’t about to sit still for having their testicles slammed in a drawer 20 times a day every Sunday for the rest of their lives.

Imagine that.

In the one time out of a thousand where there’s anything approaching muscular, principled, vertebrate Christianity, it looks like a zombie stack from World War Z as people try to get into the parking lot Sunday morning. In the other 999 churches, it looks like another episode of Ellen, except with worse music, poorer comedy, and fewer men than in her studio audience.

Good, strong, discomfiting stuff. If there’s any sector of Western civilization where the Left has enjoyed more complete success with their program of infiltration, cooptation, and incremental destruction as the Church, I can’t think of it right offhand.

His point about “whoever’s leading worship” resonates quite well with me. My whole life, my entire family and a good percentage of my friends went to the United Methodist Church. As I grew into my teens, I became aware of the struggle between our local church and the UMC leadership, which was tilting ever more sharply liberal through the late 60s and into the 70s. After I moved out on my own in the early 80s, I pretty much let my church ties go by the wayside, excepting the occasional wedding or funeral; years later, when I married Christiana, I had a close friend’s father who was a retired Southern Baptist pastor tie the knot. Pastor Rowe is a great guy: very down to earth, approachable, highly intelligent and well-read, not particularly shy about letting a mild cuss word fly after hitting his thumb with a hammer—which, being know to be pretty handy with tools, wouldn’t have been often.

The choice was a no-brainer; I was completely out of touch with whoever the pastor of my old congregation was, but I knew the ever-more-Leftward bent of my church and wasn’t in accord with it. On the other hand, I knew Pastor Rowe as a man of unswerving, deep commitment to more traditional Christian values—more than that, as a Real Man, of the old-school, country-boy, Southern working-man sort. He had raised two boys to be excellent, worthy men: hardy men, men who inspire respect and admiration, men whose friendship is cherished and counted a blessing by all whose lives they touch.

As I’ve grown older I’ve begun to feel drawn back to the church again; this tug has been strengthened by events and changes in my own life over the last decade, beginning with the death of my wife and working from there. So many of the old faces are long gone, of course. But many remain, and many of my own generation now have families who have been raised in the church as I was, with children of their own. The resilience of my old church has come as a pleasant surprise to me; the congregation fought the good fight against liberalization and bowdlerization, and it has maintained its standards and traditions against the best efforts of the namby-pamby, PC Oprahfication Aesop righteously blasts above. I’m glad for that.

The preliminaries are over

Posted on 10/6/201810/6/2018 by Mike

Francis links to a sobering, link-rich piece:

The unhinged left is planning violence against conservative members of congress, supreme court justices and their families

A lot more than just those specific groups, you may rest assured.

We are now learning that left-wing domestic terrorism groups are openly discussing “kill team” tactics on Twitter and Facebook, discussing methods of carrying SBRs (short-barreled rifles) under their clothing, blending in with crowds, then popping out of the crowds to assassinate prominent conservatives such as U.S. Senators, Supreme Court justices and prominent conservative radio personalities. All this was first reported by PJ Media.

I have recorded and published a warning to all Americans, detailing the plans of unhinged, deranged Leftists who continue to be driven to insanity by a lying, dishonest left-wing media which “feeds the frenzy” on a daily basis. With USA Today now printing columns that essentially declare Brett Kavanaugh to be a pedophile who should never be allowed near children, the so-called “media” in America has jumped the shark, abandoning anything resembling the First Amendment role of reporting the news and now resorting to smearing innocent people while encouraging mass hysteria and violence among left-wing lunatics.

The media is deliberately driving America into a bloody civil war in a desperate attempt to destabilize the nation, invoke shooting in the streets and ultimately call in United Nations “peacekeeping” troops that will depose President Trump and attempt to disarm the entire U.S. civilian population. (Fortunately for America, the people own 100+ million firearms and have a Second Amendment right to defend their nation against foreign invaders.)

All that used to be the stuff of paranoid conspiracy-theorizing. No more; nowadays, it’s observable reality. And, as Aesop notes, it’s only the beginning:

In case you thought the recent shenanigans were Peak Crazy, we have bad news for you.
It could very well be that was all just a set-up for what happens next.

Later today, we may (or not) see Judge Kavanaugh confirmed to the vacant seat on SCOTUS.

Either way, in less than a month, the chickens from all the Dumbocrat mind-losing will come home to roost, and may turn the electoral wave from blue to red. (Be still, my beating heart.)
HopeyDopey got the Left President Trump. The Kavanaugh Caper could get them slaughtered (metaphorically) in the mid-terms. And how pleasant that would be. Even more so if it turns into a two-fer.

And at any time after today on into November, or beyond, the Leftardian legions may finally unleash their unhinged end game, and go full retard. Not metaphorically.

“May”? Ain’t no “may” to it, I’m afraid; like I said, what we’ve seen with the Kavanaugh freakshow is merely the opening salvo. Wait till the anally-inserted popsicle stick propping up Ginsberg’s mouldering corpse finally breaks and Trump nominates Amy whatsername to replace her. Or even earlier, maybe, after this November’s impending electoral shellacking. Even if they can somehow contrive to restrain themselves through those sore trials, Trump’s landslide reelection in 2020 will assuredly open the madhouse gates for real. Count on it.

Let’s just stop pretending here, ‘kay?

Posted on 10/5/201810/5/2018 by Mike

Ace gets down to brass tacks on Ballsey-Fraud:

I’m getting a little tired of bending over backwards to claim “something certainly happened” to Blasey. I think she’s straight-up lying.

I can’t be sure of that, of course.

But she seems to act in bad faith a lot. I can’t fly. I went to a marriage therapist to discuss the ongoing strife of a fucking second entrance we put in two years before. I never heard you wanted to come to California to talk to me, even though it was in news accounts.

The party was near the country club. What’s that? Investigators can’t find any known “party houses” near the country club? Oh, I meant the party was somewhere between my house and the country club, a 20 minute drive by car.

Wait, none of the people I named as being at the party lived in a house that conformed to my description of it? Oh there were some other people there too. I don’t know who. I guess it was a house that belonged to a Conveniently Unknown Person.

But for me, the worst example is the nasty passive-aggressive mean-girl insinauation she dropped about Leland Keyser, claiming, innocently-sounding, that she hopes that Leland Keyser gets over the “health challenges” she’s having, strongly implying that Keyser has some kind of brain-affecting progressive disease like Alzheimer’s.

Spoiler alert: It’s not. She has back and neck problems. Nothing to do with the brain.

But Lil’ Miss Innocent Baby-Talk Vocal Fry strongly implied that her “friend” was deranged.

Some friend.

So excuse me if I do not join in with the pretend “Facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd in asserting that I know, somehow, as a fact, despite the total lack of facts to establish it, that “something happened” to Blasey.

There is absolutely no actual evidence, beyond a sneaky, deceitful woman’s say-so, that anything happened, ever.

After seeing some of her fraudulent, kid-gloves “testimony” last week, my take was/is: the woman is insane. Like, clinically, pathologically not right in the head. Mentally disturbed. Truly, deeply, pathetically off the rails.

She may in fact believe that “something happened” to her; she may well believe that, whatever it may have been, it was Kavanaugh who did it. Doesn’t matter. She’s quite clearly delusional. She appeared, throughout the part of the hearing I saw, to be hovering right on the edge of a complete breakdown. I’d bet she spends a good part of her average day teetering on that same razor’s edge between “treatable, maybe” and “completely hopeless, lock-her-up-in-a-rubber-room-and-throw-away-the-key” cray-cray. Or so it looked to me, anyway.

Kavanaugh was dead-on when he testified that he believed SOMETHING must have happened to her, but he has no idea what. And maybe something, God only knows what, actually did, sending her permanently around the bend into La-La Land. Either that, or she deserves a Best Actor Oscar for her performance. Given her intricate, years-long maneuvering to prepare for savaging Kavanaugh, perhaps the thing to do is to embrace the healing power of “and” here, eh?

Update! A vote for “calculating” over “demented.”

At first, those of us paying attention were anxious to hear Ford’s story. The bits of news that preceded her appearance before the Judiciary Committee were titillating. Was it possible that this man, Brett Kavanaugh, with a thirty-years-plus record of impeccable judicial service to his country, had a dark side? Then we heard Blasey Ford “testify.” How anyone who listened to her practiced, phony childish act could believe that this was not calculated is a mystery. She was obviously scripted, coached, and performing.

Perhaps she did not expect to have to appear before the committee. She and her handlers may have assumed that the taint of her accusation would bring about his withdrawal from the nomination or that Trump would withdraw it. Guess they have not been paying attention to how Trump operates or who Kavanaugh is. They guessed wrong.

Given the numerous falsehoods of the FBI and DOJ we now are aware of – the “two front doors” lie, the fear of flying lie, the claustrophobia lie, her polygraph lies – what seems credible now is that this was a manufactured, orchestrated setup at the outset. They used Mark Judge’s book as a template and contrived a tall tale.

And then, thanks to Lindsey Graham, Trump, and Kavanaugh himself, it blew up in their faces.

Another distinction without a difference

Posted on 10/3/201810/3/2018 by Mike

Fascism and Bolshevism: different sides, same coin?

Anti-fascism evolved from an academic fetish among Frankfurt School members into a cult of sorts in the 60’s and 70’s. The Antifa loons of today are well within the tradition of prior anti-fascist loons. The puzzle is why no similar movement ever started in response to the Soviet atrocities. Even if you think the Nazis were worse than the commies, in terms of intensity, the Bolsheviks were around a lot longer. They also managed to kill, or cause to be killed, millions around the world. The commies were a global killing machine.

Why is the former the symbol of evil, while the latter is still popular?

Paleocons, like Paul Gottfried, have suggested that communism may have an appeal to Christians that fascism lacks. That is, communism in the abstract is inclusive, universal and egalitarian. These are concepts that you find in Christianity, at least in the general sense. Anyone can become a Christian and everyone is equal before God. The Social Gospel sounds a lot like neo-Marxism and post-colonial socialism. Liberation Theology in South America is explicitly Marxist. The current Pope is out of this movement.

The problem here, of course, is that, in Europe, the Latin countries were explicitly Catholic and fascist. In fact, some scholars argue that fascism is an outgrowth of Catholic ideas like corporatism and localism. Spain under Franco was both Catholic and fascist. Portugal under Salazar was also Catholic and fascist. Of course, Mussolini’s Italy was very popular with American Progressives until the outbreak of the war. The best you can argue is that fascism seems to have had less appeal to Protestant academics that Bolshevism.

he fact is, the anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic arguments explaining the popularity of Bolshevism versus the demonization of fascism, don’t hold up under scrutiny. Both answers have some truth to them, but they don’t provide a complete answer. A big reason is that no one, especially anti-fascists, can provide a workable definition of fascism. In the book Fascism: The Career of a Concept, the aforementioned Paul Gottfried does an excellent job explaining the various and contradictory definitions of historical fascism.

This is why conservatives fall for the “liberals are the real Nazis” stuff peddled by grifters like Dinesh D’Souza and Jonah Goldberg. Fascism is a poorly defined political movement that can mean just about anything at this point. Even in the interwar period, the various fascist movements had some things in common, but they also had things in common with the Bolsheviks. After decades of anti-fascist proselytizing, fascism is simply a catch-all term for that which the Left currently finds upsetting or threatening.

As Z says, the Left liked Mussolini before the war; Hitler was also quite popular with the original Progressives…right up until he betrayed Stalin and invaded Poland, to general Leftist amazement and dismay. They and their descendants have never forgiven fascism for that. Z maintains that there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between fascism and Bolshevism, and maybe he’s right about that per se. But I think flatly declaring that no common ground exists between fascism and modern Leftist “thought” just might be a bridge too far:

Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.”

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

Another, entitled “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is “revise and resubmit”) is a “Feminist Approach to Pedagogy.” It proposes “experiential reparations” as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.

From “My Struggle” to “Our Struggle” ain’t exactly what you’d call a giant leap. But in the end, nobody needs to spend a great deal of time splitting these ideological hairs. What we’re really talking about, then and now, is tyranny versus liberty. Hang whatever name on it you like, that eternal struggle remains the basic distinction, and the bottom line.

The future is…here?

Posted on 10/1/201810/2/2018 by Mike

Crazy, man, crazy.

The Army adopted its battle rifle in 1963 and has spent 55 years looking for a replacement for the M-16 and its variants.

They might have found it in Martin Grier’s Colorado Springs garage. Grier, a self-described inventor who has worked at a local bed and breakfast, built the new “ribbon gun” with a hobbyist’s tools. It looks like a space-age toy drawn by a fifth-grader.

But goofy origins and cartoon-looks aside, this could be the gun of the future. The Army is studying Grier’s gun and has ordered a military-grade prototype.

The specifications are incredible, four 6 mm barrels cut side by side within one steel block. New ammunition blocks fired by electromagnetic actuators that could theoretically give the weapon a firing rate of 250 rounds per second.

And then there’s the feature no soldier would turn down. “It’s called a power shot,” Grier said.

That’s the shotgun feature of this sniper-shot, machine-assault gun that can send four bullets simultaneously whizzing toward an enemy at more than 2,500 mph.

It isn’t science fiction. He’s built the gun and patented the technology behind it. Now his garage-based company, FD munitions, is hoping the Army will buy it.

“A multibore firearm, with several bores within a single barrel, could potentially exhibit many of the advantages of a multibarrel design, while reducing the size, weight and complexity disadvantages,” Grier wrote in his 2016 patent application.

Pretty damned interesting stuff, ain’t it? Although at 250 rounds per second, I can see lugging the great gobs of ammo required to keep this beast fed being a real problem for the groundpounder of the not-so-distant future. Guess the Green Machine is going to need to get to work on those exoskeletons—or better yet, Heinlein’s powered-armor MI combat suits.

“Don’t Let’s be evil!”

Posted on 9/23/20189/23/2018 by Mike

Bust ’em up.

WASHINGTON — Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.

The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to “leverage” search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Iran,’ etc.” and “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico,’ ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Latino,’ etc.”

The email chain, while sprinkled with cautionary notes about engaging in political activity, suggests employees considered ways to harness the company’s vast influence on the internet in response to the travel ban.

Daniel explains:

Not surprising.

Google has already rigged search results for certain Islamic searches without being at all subtle about it. But the explosive thing here is that it was a response to a specific government policy.

He also mentions that “Google says that these plots never went beyond proposals,” and you can believe as much or as little of that as you want to. Personally, I haven’t used their search engine in a good while now, and haven’t missed it.

More Fake News!

Posted on 9/12/20189/12/2018 by Mike

Another burning question of our age addressed.

While Donald Trump has become famous for railing on about “Fake News,” the media have become quick to defend their integrity. However, the depth of the media’s lies is apparent and may be deeper than most imagine.

Let’s start with what is probably one of the greatest cultural frauds in recent history, though it is mostly unknown today: Saturday Night Fever.

The movie, and the disco fad, were based on an article, “Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” that appeared in New York Magazine in June 1976.

Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in watching this new generation. Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from disco to disco, an explorer out of my depth, I have tried to learn the patterns, the old/new tribal rites.

The problem was that the story was mostly made up.

Twenty years later came a bombshell. In December 1997 New York magazine published an article in which Cohn confessed that there never was a Vincent. There was no “Lisa”, “Billy”, “John James”, “Lorraine” or “Donna” either. While 2001 Odyssey existed, it wasn’t the way the writer described it in 1976. The whole scene of disco-loving Italians, as mythologised in Saturday Night Fever, was exaggerated. The most bizarre detail was that his disco protagonists were in fact based on mods Cohn had known in London.

So what? you might ask.

To those who remember, that fraud led to the glorification of a disco culture. But it was never as organic as the media portrayed it. It could be propped up for only so long. In 1979, the straw man was easily toppled.

It seems that Nik Cohn, the magazine writer who penned the purported true story of a Brooklyn dancer named “Vincent”– the basis for Travolta’s Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever – for New York magazine, admitted this week in New York that he made the whole thing up.

Up to that point, disco had existed, to be sure, but it was a sideline. Occasionally, it could break through to the top, as with “The Hustle,” but it never would have become the cultural imperative it became without media lies. It was foisted on us.

Well, thanks a friggin’ pantload for that, assholes.

Actually, it’s reminiscent of another genre heavily influenced by disco: rap. Despite its seeming ubiquity in everything from the music press to movies to even TV commercials, it never did sell all that well, only in the last couple of years even beginning to approach rock and roll or…uhh, country? Nevertheless, it was pimped heavily from the start by music journalists gushing that it would be the death-knell for tired, sad old rock and roll:

Rap is the rock ‘n’ roll of the day. Rock ‘n’ roll was about attitude, rebellion, a big beat, sex and, sometimes, social comment. If that’s what you’re looking for now, you’re going to find it here.
— Bill Adler, Time, 1990

So how’d that work out for ya, Bill?

With the decline in recorded-music sales reaching something of a turning point in a number of markets, it seemed like a good time to analyze the retail sales of several music genres to see whether the downturn and subsequent stabilization have been equally divided across genres or whether some genres have suffered more than others. The analysis shows that pop and rock have strengthened their hold on music sales, while rap/hip-hop, the darling of the 1990s, has suffered a decline.

The results are, in part, not totally surprising, with pop and rock music tightening their grip on retail sales in the 2000s. But rap/hip-hop, which surged in the 1990s, slipped as public criticism mounted. Sales of jazz, classical and other smaller genres also fell off.

With pop and rock accounting for a combined retail-sales share of 55% in 2009, other genres have clearly underperformed when compared with the global sales decline. Music & Copyright has found that the retail value of rap/hip-hop sales dropped almost 50% between 2000 and 2009.

And it wasn’t all that high even in the 90s; rap’s cultural reach has always exceeded its sales grasp. Back to Konrad for our hy-larious conclusion:

That disco fell so fast in 1979 is evidence that it was artificial to begin with.

What is scary is that this admitted lie still holds a grip on the culture, especially in Brooklyn, where the image is still lauded, parodied, and beloved. Well, good luck with Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where Tony Manero lived, ever regaining that faded glory. The neighborhood is now heavily Muslim.

Guess the obnoxious and annoying “call to prayer” lauded by His Most Puissant Majesty Barrack Hussein Mohammed Pahlavi Windsor Habsberg Ferdinand Winton Oblahblah as “the most beautiful sound in the world” is gonna be the Next Big Thing crammed down our throats by force and/or fraud.

Reverse evolution

Posted on 8/4/20188/4/2018 by Mike

Wait, Miranda Veracuz de Jolla Cardinale Occasional-Cortex was actually right once?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congressional candidate from New York who touts honesty and authenticity as her greatest strengths, used to describe herself as a follower of Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism — and said that terms like “feminism” and “empowerment” were “relics from the past.”

Since then, Ocasio-Cortez has come out as an unapologetic democratic socialist, wishing to see greater taxation and expansion and creation of wide-ranging social programs such as a single-payer health care system, free education, and housing as a right.

“I think my strength is I’m honest and authentic,” she told “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah last week. Those qualities helped her in June to beat top Democrat Joe Crowley, whose name was floated as the next speaker of the U.S. House.

But not that long ago, 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez harbored a lot milder if not radically different views.

So, if Churchill’s (apocryphal) proposition—if you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain—holds, it would seem that Occasional-Cortex, with her personal journey of intellectual de-evolution, has neither heart NOR brain, then.

Nuts and bolts

Posted on 7/25/20187/25/2018 by Mike

How revolution is done.

There are two recent examples American dissidents should study. The first is the Evangelical movement that started in the 1970’s as a response to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. They had unassailable principles and specific policy goals that arose from those principles. They had great organic organizations, their churches. They had money and manpower. They also focused on one party, hoping to make the GOP the counter to the Left. By the 80’s, the Evangelicals were a powerful political force.

They also failed to accomplish any of their goals. Their top issue was abortion, specifically rolling back Roe. They lobbied hard to get their guys into office and on the bench so they could get that ruling overturned. They had zero success. In fact, it is hard to find any aspect of the culture war they were able to win. If you had told Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the 70’s that their efforts would still mean gay marriage and trannies stalking little girls in public toilets, they probably would have lost their faith entirely.

The reason they lost is they engaged the ruling class on their terms. The Evangelicals agreed to play by the rules set by the ruling class. This ultimately meant supporting the ruling class institutions, like the political rules and the party system. Those things are designed to preserve the current order. In effect, the Evangelicals agreed from the start to defend and support the prevailing order. It was inevitable that their efforts would only lead to more of the same, because they agreed to all of the assumptions of the prevailing order.

Another useful example is the NRA. Starting around the same time as the Evangelicals entered politics, the NRA decided to change direction. They became apolitical, supporting only candidates that were pro-gun. They stopped arguing about the efficacy of gun control as a crime fighting tool and started arguing about gun culture as a vital part of American culture. The NRA shifted from political debates, to moral debates and captured the high ground by linking gun rights to patriotism and basic America concepts of liberty.

This is why the fight over guns has been the one exception in the culture war. The Left tried hard to capture the high ground, usually by standing on the bodies of dead kids, but they failed because the NRA always fights to hold the moral high ground. They never conceded the premise or the moral framework of the debate. When the Left says they wants guns off the streets because of the children, the NRA says they wants guns in the hands of parents, so they can protect their children and themselves.

The lesson for our thing is to first understand where we are in the process. Our job right now is to grow our numbers by promoting about our ideas. Part of doing that is taking every opportunity to undermine the other side’s moral authority. Just as important, it means developing a genuine alternative to the moral order. A counter-culture has its own ethos, which means its own media, its own language and its own comedy. That last part is important, because what we mock speaks directly to what we believe.

Oh, I’m definitely on board with the mocking thing. On the other hand, how can the Dissident Right possibly lose when it’s up against complete batshit insanity?

One of the first murmurings of this supremely nutty trend erupted back in 2011, when a Toronto couple announced that they would be raising their new child, whom they saddled with the name “Storm,” completely oblivious to the idea that in nearly all cases, one’s genitals determine their gender—and in the rare cases where the person suffers from a delusion that they don’t, that person is likely to suffer massive psychological problems at the very least.

Now age five, baby Storm has decided that she’s a girl. Her ten-year-old sibling, Jazz, “identifies as a transgender girl, having begun her transition three days before she turned 7.” Her seven-year-old sibling Kio “identifies as non-binary and uses the pronoun ‘they,’” as does these poor children’s mom, while their dad’s personal pronouns are “he or they.”

Do you get the sense that this family has a lot of free time on their hands? Do you also get the sense that the parents are using their own children as inanimate sexual voodoo dolls through which they’re either working out their own bottomless psychiatric issues or skin-peelingly shallow cultural trendiness? Do you also get the sense that when—sorry, “if”—these kids grow up, at least one of them will hate their parents with a burning, cancerous fury?

Say hi to three-year-old twins Zyler and Kadyn Sharpe, who were fortunate enough to have born in the rarefied climes of Cambridge, MA. Despite their financial fortunes, little Zyler and Kadyn suffer the handicap of parents who gave them space-alien names and who refuse to just buck the fuck up and tell them whether they’re boys or girls.

Nate Sharpe, father of the gender-indeterminate three-year-olds with space-alien names, knows damn well what genitals his kids were born with, but he sternly and staunchly refuses to reveal these simple biological facts in favor of parading these poor toddlers around like miniature rainbow-colored circus freaks:

A theyby is, I think, different things to different people. For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns — so, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their,’ rather than assigning ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’ from birth based on their anatomy.

See, but Nate, these terms are based on anatomy. For some reason, every last one of you gender-dreamers seem to stub your toe on the hilariously simple fact that “she” is a term that has always meant nothing more and nothing less than “that person over there with the vagina.”

Let that freak flag fly, and be sure all the Normals see you doing it. How much further can they go? Plenty, says Hanson. And the psychos will be taking more-sane Democrat Socialists (if any) who are running for office with them.

There is no respite from the war against Trump. The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.

There is no respite; there is no refuge—not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump.

The progressive hysteria reveals the lack of an idea. Kill, humiliate, delegitimize Trump is not a sustainable political agenda whether winning a local assembly seat or a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. But then neither are socialist ideas. If the Left was intellectually honest it would run in November on what it now professes are its new core beliefs: the abolition of ICE, the end to all deportations, open borders, expansions of affirmative action, abortion on demand, and identity politics, cancellation of student debt, universal Medicare-like coverage for Americans of all ages, massive tax hikes, more regulations, and less fossil fuel production, and an EU-like socialist-democratic foreign policy.

The problem is that the above is probably not a 51 percent winnable program. And progressives fear that their base will not allow them to move to the center to capture the old blue-collar white working class, or the Perot, Tea-Party and Blue Dog voter. Nor can they afford to move much further leftward, given they are increasingly dependent on Obama-like identity politics candidates without an Obama-like charismatic candidate.

Democrats privately acknowledge that Obama wrecked the Democratic Party—losing Congress, the presidency, state and local offices, and now the Supreme Court. But they must praise the forces of that wreckage and seek to trump them by becoming the party of hyper-identity politics. In other words, the Democrats know what sort of agenda might bring them back into power as it did in 1992. But they feel that Clintonesque cure is worse than the disease of being in the purer political wilderness without power.

So, for now, they rant, they rave, and they stew, accepting that they cannot do what might save them and therefore they only do more of what is destroying them.

In the spirit of never interfering with your enemy when he’s making a mistake: keep up the good work, nutjobs, you’re doing great!

Update! I repeat: nutjobs. If America is so far gone in narcissistic degeneracy that pimping such patent codswallop is a winning electoral formula, then we damned well deserve the doom that awaits us.

Emanations, penumbras, and interpretations

Posted on 7/11/20187/11/2018 by Mike

It’s not that the Left fails to grasp the point of the Constitution’s unbending, timeless nature. It’s that they’re opposed to it. And rightly so, by their own (dim) lights.

Sure, some of the anger aimed (at) Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is partisan bluster meant to placate the activist base. Still, most Democrats were going to get hysterical about any pick, because any conservative pick was going to take the Constitution far too literally for their liking. For those who rely on the administrative state and coercion as a policy tool — forcing people to join political organizations, forcing them to support abortion, forcing them to subsidize socially progressive sacraments, forcing them to create products that undermine their faith, and so on — that’s a big problem.

Leading presidential contender Bernie Sanders, whose collectivist doctrine clashes directly with the Constitution’s goal of restraining the state and empowering the individual, worried about “workers’ rights, health care, climate change, environmental protection and gun safety.” He should.

Kavanaugh, with Justice Neil Gorsuch, is a critic of Chevron deference, the practice that allows administrative agencies to ignore their legal charge and have free rein to interpret statutory authority in virtually any way they please. Few things undermine the socialist agenda more than limiting our regulatory agencies’ ability to lord over the economic decisions of Americans.

Normalizing the idea that the Constitution should be subservient to the fleeting will of politics or progressive conceptions of “justice” goes back to Barack Obama…

Oh, it goes back one hell of a lot farther than that, David—all the way back to the original Progressives themselves, in fact, who saw the Constitution as precisely what it was meant to be: a roadblock standing in the way of their totalitarian ambitions, one they were going to have to smash to bits in order to see their utopian dreams achieved.

Notable quotes

Posted on 7/11/20187/11/2018 by Mike

I’ve seen some of the D-Right guys here and there disparaging Thomas Sowell as—well, not quite a cuck, maybe, but definitely one of the useless Conservative Old Guard. I dunno, I’ve always liked the guy myself, and still do. He’s sharp as they come, and definitely has a way with words. To wit:

21. “It would be hard to think of a more ridiculous way to make decisions than to transfer those decisions to third parties who pay no price for being wrong. Yet that is what at least half of the bright ideas of the political left amount to.”

20. “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.”

19. “‘We are a nation of immigrants,’ we are constantly reminded. We are also a nation of people with ten fingers and ten toes. Does that mean that anyone who has ten fingers and ten toes should be welcomed and given American citizenship?”

18. “It is amazing how many people think that the government’s role is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want.”

Hawkins has collected thirty of ’em for this article, my own favorite being this one:

15. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

They’re all damned good, although the Tweet that leads things off is kinda depressing. Here’s another short piece, noting his retirement a couple years ago, which includes a link to an archive of his excellent work. Long may you wave, Dr Sowell, and happy belated birthday to you.

Epic!

Posted on 7/4/20187/4/2018 by Mike

Still the best July 4th story of all time.

On this day in 1826, 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted in Philadelphia, John Adams died at home in Braintree. One of the great men of the Revolutionary generation and the second president of the United States, Adams was 91 years old. Shortly before he breathed his last, John Adams whispered, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

But he was wrong.

In fact, 560 miles away at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson had died only a few hours earlier. The fact that these two founding fathers died on the same day and that it was, of all days, the Fourth of July was not viewed as a coincidence. In his two-hour eulogy at Fanueil Hall, Daniel Webster cited it as “proof” of how much God cared for the country.

Of course, there’s more to the Jefferson/Adams saga than just that.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the last surviving members of the original American revolutionaries who had stood up to the British empire and forged a new political system in the former colonies. However, while they both believed in democracy and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their opinions on how to achieve these ideals diverged over time.

Adams preceded Jefferson as president (1797-1800); it was during this time that their ideas about policy-making became as distinct as their personalities. The irascible and hot-tempered Adams was a firm believer in a strong centralized government, while the erudite and gentile Jefferson believed federal government should take a more hands-off approach and defer to individual states’ rights. As Adams’ vice president, Jefferson was so horrified by what he considered to be Adams’ abuse of the presidency–particularly his passage of the restrictive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798–that he abandoned Adams and Washington for his estate at Monticello. There, he plotted how to bring his Republican faction back into power in the presidential election of 1800. After an exceptionally bitter campaign, in which both parties engaged in slanderous attacks on each other in print, Jefferson emerged victorious. It appeared the former friends would be eternal enemies.

After serving two presidential terms (1801-1809), Jefferson and Adams each expressed to third parties their respect the other and their desire to renew their friendship. Adams was the first to break the silence; he sent Jefferson a letter dated January 1, 1812, in which he wished Jefferson many happy new years to come. Jefferson responded with a note in which he fondly recalled when they were fellow laborers in the same cause. The former revolutionaries went on to resume their friendship over 14 years of correspondence during their golden years.

If you have any interest in history and haven’t read David McCullough’s John Adams yet, you really ought to. It’s a good ‘un.

Right man, right place, right time

Posted on 6/30/20186/30/2018 by Mike

Seconded, heartily.

The 5-4 SCOTUS decisions upholding the constitutionality of President Trump’s travel ban and declaring the unconstitutionality of public sector unions extorting money from non-members to support political parties, candidates, and causes they oppose are two more benefits from President Trump’s appointment of originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy provides another opportunity to appoint another justice like the late Antonin Scalia, an originalist who believed that the words of the Constitution should be interpreted as written by the Founders in the context of the time in which they were written. I put forward the name of Sen. Ted Cruz.

Trump warned during the campaign that the Second Amendment was under attack, and there was no better defender of the Second Amendment than Ted Cruz. He would be a worthy replacement for the late Justice Scalia, with whom Cruz helped save the Second Amendment in the momentous Heller decision.

What few people know — and the media won’t remind them — is that Ted Cruz was a prime mover in getting Heller, in which Scalia wrote the majority opinion, before the Court and decided in favor of gun rights, ruling that the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right and that the word “militia”, as the Founders intended, meant the “whole people” of the United States. If Heller had gone the other way, our gun rights would have been thrown on the ash heap of history.

Before endorsing Trump, and perhaps one of the reasons aside from SCOTUS picks, Cruz received support from Trump in fighting the Obama administration’sInternet giveaway that removed it from U.S. control. They are more in agreement than some commentators think.

Sobieski mentions that there are those out there who think Cruz might turn it down, but I can’t really see that myself. Ted seems to have the right idea about SC jurisprudence and the Constitution itself—with the added benefit that such a move by Trump would give GOPe NeverTrumpTards a nervous breakdown over whether to shit or go blind. The Left, of course, will continue on with their rubber-room hysterics no matter who he nominates. All in all, I think Cruz would make a fine Justice, and a most salutary replacement for the execrable Ginsberg.

UNEXPECTED!

Posted on 6/26/2018 by Mike

I’m flabbergasted.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Guardian, Lynch admitted to supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, before supporting Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in the presidential election. However, he now appears to believe that Trump may have been the right choice.

“I am not really a political person, but I really like the freedom to do what you want to do,” Lynch explained. “[Trump] could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.”

“Our so-called leaders can’t take the country forward, can’t get anything done,” the Oscar-nominated director said. “Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.”

Can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of his work, and if this article is any guide his political leanings seem…well, incoherent would be one way of putting it, I guess. But I certainly would never have expected this.

Serious talk

Posted on 6/23/20186/23/2018 by Mike

Longtime fellow blogger Robin Burk sends this:

Mike,

It’s way overdue for me to say thanks for what you do on your blog. I’ve read you since way back, when I was at Winds of Change and then (anonymously because of my employer) at Rantburg.

Your work at the blog is an important voice. So I thought I’d let you know about a story you might find useful.

Here’s the background. After 9/11 I ended up teaching at West Point. Along the way I got involved in a brand new area of research and went down to DC to manage a program in the field for DOD. We were looking for new ways to model how WMD of all kinds – not just the big old fry-’em nukes – would impact the US or elsewhere if they were used. DOD needed this because nobody had a way to really model what would happen now that we rely so heavily on so many systems that depend on one another.

What we found sobered me.

Today I see the signs (don’t we all) that our social systems and political systems are under major strain. The National Academies just issued a report admitting we have major vulnerabilities in the US power grid. And more.

So I agreed to give a TEDx talk, on very little notice, about this and about steps we can take to reduce system unraveling. It’s not a polished talk. I didn’t hire a professional wardrobe and makeup person, or focus group the message. But when I learned that TEDx talks are being used in high school classes, and when I watched some (sigh), I knew I had to do this.

Here’s the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMfxbxuuwY
If you would, please view it (it’s about 12 minutes long). And if you’re willing, please Like/thumbs up it and help me get the word out on this issue. I used to think that if people don’t make some basic emergency prep, that’s their choice. But now I know the side effects their choice will have on my family and friends, and on yours, and on the country as a whole.

Like you, I responded to 9/11 with cold, inner fury and resolve. We can and must continue to push back on the forces that would destroy the best approximation of human liberty and dignity the world has ever seen.

As you’d expect, it’s grim but vital stuff. This is important work she’s doing here, I think, and my thanks to her for the heads up.

The REAL danger to the economy

Posted on 6/19/20186/19/2018 by Mike

Is the constant use of “engine” metaphors.

Every conversation about the economy invariably compares it to a mechanical device.

When the economy is going well, it’s “humming” or “chugging along.” When it’s not, it’s “sputtering” or “stalled.”

We “prime the pump” with stimulus spending during a recession and hope the economy will reach “escape velocity.” Tax cuts and more federal spending can “fuel growth” or “turbocharge” it. Money gets “pumped into” it.

Comparing the economy to an engine means that it’s made up of parts that interact in precise ways and that, if they break down, can easily be fixed by smart technicians. It suggests that pushing the right buttons and flipping the right switches, adding the right mix of fuel in the proper amounts will keep it running smoothly.

The metaphor ends up driving reality, and economic policy prescriptions. Yet these policy prescriptions almost never work as intended. Stimulus plans don’t stimulate. Fed rate hikes often cause the recessions they’re supposed to prevent. As Paul Krugman put it, “bad metaphors make for bad policy.”

IBD recommends a more appropriate and accurate metaphor for the economy, which in turn suggests the best approach to “managing” it: “At best, we can leave it alone.” Problem being, given the choice between taking their grubby mitts off of the economy to the increased prosperity and benefit of all and “managing” it right into perpetual disaster and ruin, guess which one statists will pick? I mean, it IS only the central tenet of the Progressivist religion, after all.

Alternative take: “The Deep State is winning”

Posted on 6/18/20186/18/2018 by Mike

Dunno if I quite buy that. Not yet, anyway.

The extreme politicization of federal bureaucracies was routine and common knowledge during the Obama Administration. Upper leadership of those bureaucracies assumed life would continue as usual once their preferred candidate won the presidency. But Hillary Clinton lost. Now institutions that had been corrupted with partisanship found they could not continue to operate in the vacuum of accountability as they had under President Obama.

So the inspector general’s report is maybe best understood less as an exercise in truth finding and more a matter of managing public perceptions. We saw a similar effort at self-diagnosis immediately after the 9/11 attacks. In that instance, the entire national security apparatus failed. Every one of our multi-billion-dollar national security institutions was negligent in protecting America. Yet, somehow, no one was held accountable for their failures. In fact, most everyone received major pay increases!

The swamp always comes out ahead.

He goes on to make a pretty good case, actually. But a very large number of Americans are now irrevocably “woke” to the Deep State’s existence and its deeply corrupt nature, and there’s no unseeing the rot that’s been exposed. It all boils down to one thing: WILL the scurrilous traitors who tried to undermine the cornerstone of American self-government skate with no more than token wrist-slaps for a paltry handful of minor players? It’s a very real and uncomfortable possibility all right, but I’ll continue holding my cynicism in abeyance for the nonce.

The IG report was, after all, the product of Justice having been allowed to investigate itself; as corrupt as we now know that degenerate department to be, no one should have expected much else from them. Everything depends on Trump’s next moves, and how bold and straightforward he’s willing to be. He’s habitually gone full-on scorched-earth-nuclear on enemies in the past; cuththroat as NYC real estate is, though, this is a much bigger and more serious game, for far higher stakes. We’ll know soon enough if Trump has the go-to-hell gumption to hold to his old modus now.

It’ll take quite a bit of gumption too: the Deep State crawly things remain both powerful and dangerous, and nobody should imagine for a moment that they’d be above assassination to retain their grip on power and impunity. Their now amply-demonstrated fumblefooted incompetence is the only comfort and assurance in such a black scenario. Certainly Strzok and McCabe, at the very least, ought to be sleeping with a loaded pistol under the pillow at this point. Surely Trump’s SS detail and his own personal security team are aware of the incredible vigilance required of them now.

Update! Schlichter is of two minds:

The IG report sidestepped the most critical point, the one that is resulting in the American people losing their last remaining fragments of faith in our system, the fact that there are demonstrably two sets of rules, that there are two brands of justice in America.

There is one for you, me, and everyone else not in the elite – the infuriated, angry Normals. And there is another one for the elite.

Our country cannot go on like this. The rule of law matters, and the rule of law does not have exceptions that exempt preferred people and groups. We have tolerated this abomination long enough – it has to stop. Either the elite rediscovers its sense of duty and service and stops it, or we will stop it. Donald Trump is our latest attempt to do that. If he is unable to do so, the elite is really going to hate what we try next.

See, they don’t get to win.

The IG report, simultaneously a devastating indictment of elite misconduct and a total whitewash, is a symptom of the moral leprosy infecting our elite. It is rotting away our institutions, and the foundations of the United States as we knew it. But the elite can’t, or won’t, even admit to itself what we all see.

And this means that means the elite can’t, or won’t, do what is necessary to repair the damage the elite itself has caused our country.

It’s won’t. Because they don’t consider it damage.

An intriguing idea

Posted on 6/16/20186/16/2018 by Mike

CF-regular gadfly Mark Mattis presents one.

North Korea is going to need significant assistance to transition successfully from a military economy to a civil economy. I would like to suggest that to help them, the US should cut all funds to the United Nations, give that money instead to the Salvation Army, and request that they use it to help North Korea make the change. The assistance will need to be distributed across the country, and the North Korean military is well positioned to do that work. Giving current military members something important to do is a critical part of the transition, so this helps in more ways than one. And they would be getting some of the aid as well, so this also makes their lives better in the process.

The Salvation Army command structure is set up well to be able to interface with the North Korean military leadership. In North Korea, Kim should put the Salvation Army leadership at the same level as the heads of his military, reporting directly to him. The Salvation Army leadership would identify what aid was coming, but the tasking to distribute that would be done by the North Korean military. The Salvation Army should embed a small number of people at the final distribution level, but the actual distribution would be done by the Korean soldiers. The embeds would make suggestions, and report up to their leadership as to any problems in the field. Their leadership would have direct access to Kim, who knows how to take care of problems with his employees. I do not expect much graft, fraud, or corruption after the first few cases are dealt with. And the Salvation Army leadership in North Korea would also report directly to Secretary of State Pompeo, who would be able to realign things appropriately if any backsliding occurs. In my not so humble opinion, that would be “Win, Win, Win!”

I’m sure there are probably eight bazillion reasons why it couldn’t work, some of them possibly even sound ones. But man, the way it would frost shitlib nuts makes it worth considering all by itself.

SWATting the Hogg

Posted on 6/8/20186/9/2018 by Mike

I’m probably gonna annoy some people with this. Oh well.

An anonymous — and fraudulent — hostage-situation emergency call to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office resulted in a Coral Springs Fire rescue team racing to the family home of Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.

A local TV station reported that “Hogg was not home at the time of the incident and is currently in Washington, DC with his mother to accept the RFK Human Rights award.”

SWATting is the dangerous “prank” of calling in fake crime reports in order to get heavily armed police to show up at the victim’s house. The resulting situation is potentially deadly.

The condemnation for today’s SWATting attempt on Hogg and his family has been swift and universal — and that’s just the condemnation coming from the Right.

Follows, a whole passel of Tweets from Righties screaming about how just awfully awful it is that it happened to the little twit.*

But honestly, guys? I just ain’t feeling it. Yes, yes, it’s a horrible, no good, and very dangerous thing to do. No decent person would ever dream of doing such a thing. It puts innocent lives at risk, wastes police resources and time, and has resulted in at least one wrongful death that I know of.

And as with doxxing, it’s now become just another arrow in the Leftist quiver; they’ve used it against their enemies—that would be us, in case you were uncertain about it—without a thought or care, way more than once. It represents another line of civilized behavior trampled under Lefty jackbooks with nary a look back.

So do I get upset when the Left has it thrown back at them? Why no, I can’t say that I do. Do I wish such abuses didn’t happen? Sure I do. Would I rather things hadn’t come to such a godawful pass? Of course. Would I ever dream of doing such myself, or recommend that someone else do so? Not in a million years. Am I going to join others on the Right in anguishing over it happening to the Left now that they’ve long since declared open season on us, with no holds barred and no bag limit?

Nope.

It goes back to what I’ve been saying for a while now: the Left needs to be made to feel pain—real pain, pain that can’t be waved away or brushed off—for their ever-escalating depredations against decency, civilized behavior, and the right to dissent. Seems to me that this is one way to make that so, if an admittedly extreme one.

Anybody see this story earlier today?

Congressman Steve Scalise returns to baseball a year after he was shot at practice

Watch the video. It’s pitiful…and enraging. Hats off to Scalise, of course; he’s shown nothing but class, heart, and courage throughout what one might call his man-caused ordeal, and one can but admire him for that. But he was crippled, most likely for life, by a Democrat Socialist true-believer who only differs from the so-called “mainstream” in his willingness to act on the things they’ve all been saying.

Note, too, that the nearly-successful attempt on his life was “condemned” in only the most mealy-mouthed, half-hearted, and self-serving terms by Democrat Socialist leaders, and even that only after they’d been hectored about it by the Right. As for the Progtard rank and file, the main takeaway from their response was the openly-expressed regret that the shooter didn’t succeed in killing the guy.

And this same despicable response happens every time any similar atrocity occurs. Every. Single. Time. You could set your clock by it.

Now, I’m not slamming all those well-intentioned folks on the Decent Right who reacted with honest horror over Hogg’s SWATting. But I’m not going to be joining them. It sounds to me like the old “This is NOT WHO WE ARE” argument writ larger, deployed on a different battlefield than the usual NeverTrumpTard one.

We’re in a war here, people; maybe not a shooting war, not yet, but a war just the same. Seeing how they’ve brutalized good, honest people on our side again and again and again without repercussion, my patience with them is exhausted, my sympathy when some of their own splashes back on them nonexistent. Some lying, clueless liberty-thief gets himself SWATted, or doxxed, or sucker-punched? Meh. It’s just sauce for the fucking goose as far as I’m concerned. Most of them deserve a lot worse. And if they keep on pushing their fascist agenda, they’ll quite likely get it, too, before all’s said and done.

*Note, too, that the whole thing smells to high heaven anyway, if Hogg’s own too-blasé response is any sort of tell—and it is.

Update! Dang it, I double-posted this one by accident, discovered the error this morning, and deleted the one with the comments attached before heading out to work. Gonna try to fix that in just a bit if I can; sorry for the glitch, guys.

Do the math

Posted on 5/27/20185/27/2018 by Mike

You ain’t getting ’em, gun-grabbers.

The foregoing math on the roughly 20 million semi-auto rifles is not the full extent of the problem for the gun grabbers. Additionally, there are at least 50 million centerfire handguns that would be suitable for resistance warfare. (And another 3 million being made or imported each year.) There are also perhaps 40 million scoped centerfire deer rifles in private hands. The vast majority of those have no traceable paper trail. Fully capable of 500+ yard engagement, these rifles could be employed to out-range the tyrants and their minions.

Then there are the estimated 1.5 million unregistered machineguns now in the country. Except for a 30-day amnesty in 1968 that generated only about 65,000 registrations, they have been contraband since 1934. Their number is particularly difficult to accurately estimate, since some semi-autos such as the M1 Carbine, HK91/93/94 series, and AR-15 are fairly easy to convert to selective fire. Similarly, nearly all “open bolt” semi-auto designs are easy to convert to full auto. Large numbers of conversion parts sets have been sold, with little recordkeeping. Some guns can be converted simply by removing sear springs or filing their sears. Just a trickle of unregistered full autos are seized or surrendered each year. This begs the question: If Federal officials have been unable to round up un-papered machineguns after 84 years, then how do they expect to ever confiscate semi-autos, which are 15 times more commonplace?

As evidenced by the 1990s wars in the Balkans, when times get inimical, contraband guns get pulled out of walls and put into use. We can expect to see the same, here.

Now, to get back to the simple mathematics, here are some ratios to ponder:

NRA members (5.2 million) to Door Kickers (82,863) = 63-to-1 ratio

Military veterans (20.4 million) to Door Kickers (82,863) = 249-to-1 ratio

Unregistered machineguns (1.5 million) to Door Kickers (82,863) = 18-to-1 ratio

Privately owned semi-auto rifles (40 million) to Door Kickers (82,863) = 485-to-1 ratio

 The mathematics that I’ve cited don’t bode well for the gun-grabbing collectivists.

He has a lot more, and I do mean a LOT. It all adds up to total nightmare for fever-dreaming totalitarians, who really ought to find themselves better uses for their time.

(Via MisHum)

Harshing your mellow since 9/01

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