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Happy birthday

Posted on November 28, 2022November 28, 2022 by Mike

To one of the greats, a true American original.

Berry Gordy: The Visionary Who Made Motown

A company that was started with a loan of $800 went on to help shape the sound of the 20th century. We could only be talking about Motown Records, founded on January 12, 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr, who was born in the city he helped make synonymous with soulfulness, Detroit, on November 28, 1929. Unfailingly spritely, just ahead of his 90th birthday, Gordy announced his retirement at the Hitsville Honours ceremony, safe in the knowledge that his achievements will last forever.

Gordy built his empire on his early success as a songwriter, notably of “Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops” and others for perhaps the pre-eminent black music entertainer of the late 1950s, Jackie Wilson.

“Of the late 1950s”? RUFKM? Try: of all time, it’s a much better fit. Don’t believe me?

Jackie was so incredibly, unbelievably good that a young Elvis Presley, on his first time seeing him perform in Vegas, was so blown away by the show he asked to come backstage to visit with “Mr Excitement” in the green room, to which request Wilson graciously acceded. Elvis made his obeisances to a man he recognized as one of the most awe-inspiring vocalists the world has ever seen or ever will see before solemnly swearing that he would never, not EVER, willingly follow Jackie onstage.

Smart fella, that Elvis.

The two nascent legends shared a few laughs and hung out awhile just shooting the familiar old road-dog breeze, then Wilson explained one of his own stage tricks to Elvis: gulp down a bunch of salt tablets and drink a gallon or two of water before going out onstage, so as to make oneself sweat profusely during the show, something any audience just loves to see from a singer; as Wilson told E at the time, “the chicks love it.”

Elvis used the trick forever after, there being but one minor little problem with the technique—it’s just liable to kill ya from a heart attack or stroke eventually. In fact, it was almost certainly a contributing factor in Jackie Wilson’s own debilitating heart attack a few years on down the road, a setback from which he never really recovered.

On September 29, 1975, Wilson was one of the featured acts in Dick Clark‘s Good Ol’ Rock and Roll Revue, hosted by the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He was in the middle of singing “Lonely Teardrops” when he suffered a massive heart attack. On the words “My heart is crying” he collapsed on stage; audience members applauded as they initially thought it was part of the act. Clark sensed something was wrong, then ordered the musicians to stop the music. Cornell Gunter of the Coasters, who was backstage, noticed Wilson was not breathing. Gunter was able to resuscitate him and Wilson was then rushed to a nearby hospital.

Medical personnel worked to stabilize Wilson’s vital signs, but the lack of oxygen to his brain caused him to slip into a coma. He briefly recovered in early 1976, and was even able to take a few wobbly steps, but slipped back into a semi-comatose state.

Wilson’s friend, fellow singer Bobby Womack, planned a benefit at the Hollywood Palladium to raise funds for Wilson on March 4. Wilson was deemed conscious but incapacitated in early June 1976, unable to speak but aware of his surroundings. He was a resident of the Medford Leas Retirement Center in Medford, New Jersey, when he was admitted into Memorial Hospital of Burlington County in Mount Holly, New Jersey, due to having trouble taking nourishment, according to his attorney John Mulkerin. Elvis Presley covered a large portion of Wilson’s medical bills. Wilson’s friend Joyce McRae tried to become his caregiver while he was in a nursing home, but he was placed in the guardianship of his estranged wife Harlean Harris and her lawyer John Mulkerin in 1978.

Wilson died on January 21, 1984, at the age of 49 from complications of pneumonia. He was initially buried in an unmarked grave at Westlawn Cemetery near Detroit.

So sad. But all this got me to revisiting a few of my personal all-time Motown faves on YewToob, a list which would necessarily have to include this slice of pure musical genius on it.

Pay especial attention to what the aptly-named Miracles are doing behind Smokey here; it pulls the entire song together in a way most non-professionals will never even notice at all—a thing often striven for by tunesmiths, but seldom achieved except in the verymost brilliant compositions.

And yes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were also on Motown, of course. Actually, Robinson himself was the label’s VP from 1972 until 1990, two years after the company had been sold.

So yeah, happy 93rd birthday to the great Berry Gordy, who brought us so very much wonderful, wonderful music on the Motown label. Thanks for that, sir, and God bless you.

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SHOCKER!!!

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

Imagine my surprise.

There’s a remarkable concession appearing in The Washington Post today:

“a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.”

The latest data shows that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August 2022 were from people who were vaccinated or boosted. Based on past figures and the current trends, we can reasonably estimate that the number of vaccinated/boosted COVID-19 deaths will only rise. (In September 2021, the vaccinated accounted for 23% of COVID-19 deaths; in January/February 2022, the vaccinated were 42%.)

This is what happens when you rush ineffective and dangerous vaccines.

It’s also what happens when you blindly put your trust in institutions wholly, demonstrably undeserving of it.

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A small victory…?

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

Not yet, but perhaps the first stirrings of what may someday become one.

I’m Thankful This Year For Everyone Fighting Against Transing The Kids

A gender “non-binary” lunatic shot up a gay safe space (otherwise known as a nightclub) so apparently anyone who ever thought it inappropriate for children to attend sexed-up drag shows is supposed to repent.

How about: No.

The success of the year has been making the weird and kinky things that liberals are doing with the nation’s children a fundamental political issue across the country. When moms and dads found out their kids were being trained in public school on how to hate white people and the ins and outs of transgenderism, they rose up to tell the taxpayer-funded public schools in unison: Knock it off, right now.

Elected leaders such as Govs. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin became heroes in no small part because they confronted the crisis by enacting policies explicitly banning the sick indoctrination of children. But they couldn’t have done it without influential voices on the right such as Tucker Carlson, the Libs of TikTok angel, and activist Christopher Rufo.

The saddest thing of all to contemplate is that we allowed them to drag us so very deeply into a sick mire of perversion, depravity, and amoral manipulation before offering a single word of condemnation over it.

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The lesson of Thanksgiving

Posted on November 24, 2022November 24, 2022 by Mike

Very simple, very easy: eschew socialism.

Turns out, you can’t just ignore economics and human nature.

Socialism really does sound good on paper though, right? We’re all going to own everything together and take care of each other. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.“

It sounds so nice. And we all want to be nice, right? People are emotionally drawn to socialism because it sounds so good. It sounds fair. It sounds — nice.

But do you know what’s not nice?

Corpses.

That’s exactly what happened the Pilgrims got when they took a stab at socialism.

Most Americans don’t know that the Plymouth colony was originally an experiment in socialist utopianism and were it not for a complete 180 a couple of years in, we probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the bountiful feasts most of us will indulge in today. There would have been no Thanksgiving because there would have been nobody left to give thanks.

It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without including Rush Limbaugh’s classic recounting and analysis of the true meaning of the day.

“On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims,” now known as Pilgrims, “led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established” how they would live once they got there. The contract set forth “just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs,” or political beliefs. “Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.

The Pilgrims were a “devoutly religious people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.” They believed in God. They believed they were in the hands of God. As you know, “this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey” to the New World on the tiny, by today’s standards, sailing ship. It was long, it was arduous.

There was sickness, there was seasickness, it was wet. It was the opposite of anything you think of today as a cruise today on the open ocean. When they “landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.” There was nothing.

“[T]he sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims — including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.” They endured that first winter. “When spring finally came,” they had, by that time, met the indigenous people, the Indians, and indeed the “Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers” and other animals “for coats.” But there wasn’t any prosperity. “[T]hey did not yet prosper!” They were still dependent. They were still confused. They were still in a new place, essentially alone among likeminded people.

“This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than what it really was. That happened, don’t misunderstand. That all happened, but that’s not — according to William Bradford’s journal — what they ultimately gave thanks for. “Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract” that they made on the Mayflower as they were traveling to the New World…

They actually had to enter into that contract “with their merchant-sponsors in London,” because they had no money on their own. The needed sponsor. They found merchants in London to sponsor them. The merchants in London were making an investment, and as such, the Pilgrims agreed that “everything they produced to go into a common store,” or bank, common account, “and each member of the community was entitled to one common share” in this bank. Out of this, the merchants would be repaid until they were paid off.

“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.” Everything belonged to everybody and everybody had one share in it. They were going to distribute it equally.” That was considered to be the epitome of fairness, sharing the hardship burdens and everything like that. “Nobody owned anything. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California,” and other parts of the country, “and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.

“Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that” it wasn’t working. It “was as costly and destructive…” His own journals chronicle the reasons it didn’t work. “Bradford assigned a plot of land” to fix this “to each family to work and manage,” as their own. He got rid of the whole commune structure and “assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” and whatever they made, however much they made, was theirs. They could sell it, they could share it, they could keep it, whatever they wanted to do.

“For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,’” without any payment, “‘that was thought injustice.’ Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?…The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive.

“So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands [everybody] industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’…

“Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s. … In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you’re laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.

“And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’” The word of the success of the free enterprise Plymouth Colony spread like wildfire and that began the great migration. Everybody wanted a part of it. There was no mass slaughtering of the Indians. There was no wiping out of the indigenous people, and eventually — in William Bradford’s own journal — unleashing the industriousness of all hands ended up producing more than they could ever need themselves.

So trading post began selling and exchanging things with the Indians — and the Indians, by the way, were very helpful. Puritan kids had relationships with the children of the Native Americans that they found. This killing the indigenous people stuff, they’re talking about much, much, much, much later. It has nothing to do with the first thanksgiving.

The first Thanksgiving was William Bradford and Plymouth Colony thanking God for their blessings. That’s the first Thanksgiving. Nothing wrong with being grateful to the Indians; don’t misunderstand. But the true meaning of Thanksgiving — and this is what George Washington recognized in his first Thanksgiving proclamation.

No wonder shitlibs loathe and despise this quintessentially American holiday so intensely. The Thanksgiving story revolves around gratitude; humility; pluck; human fallibility. It is a glorious confirmation of human resilience and adaptability. Above all else, it stands as a resounding condemnation, in the most practical and readily comprehensible of terms, of their preferred ideology: socialism. For your typical, garden-variety shitlib, what’s to like?

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Be it hereby resolved

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation.

New York, 3 October 1789

By the President of the United States of America. a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

Well said, sir. Of course, and as always.

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1

Kid Rock gets RESULTS

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

I love the guy, I truly do.

Musician Kid Rock spoke out about the potential demolition of legendary country music singer Hank Williams’ antebellum home Tuesday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Beechwood Hall, located near Franklin, Tennessee, was built in the 1850s and survived the Civil War. It was owned by Hank Williams and country music stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.

Fund manager Larry Keele bought the 268-acre estate in 2021, but Williamson County residents fear for the home, alleging demolition could be in the near future.

Rock told host Tucker Carlson he is “sick of seeing history torn to the ground.”

“Whether it be in the form of monuments, statues and now something so important here in Nashville… where does it end?” he asked.

The current owner denies any plans to demolish the battered old crib, which from one of the photos does indeed look to be in rough shape. Which detracts not a whit from Da Kid’s on-point sentiment that he’s “sick of seeing history torn to the ground.” You’re by no means alone in that, KR.

Preach it, Kid.

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Best wishes to all

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

The very happiest of T-days to all CF Lifers wherever they may be, along with a heartfelt happy birthday to my brother-in-arms-and-everything-else Big Country as well. May your days be merry, and bright.

5

Self-loathing, humiliation, shame

Posted on November 24, 2022November 24, 2022 by Mike

That’s the kink.

NBC reporter Ben Collins said on Peacock’s “MTP NOW” that parents take children to all-age drag brunches to meet a drag queen “just to show them they’re human beings.”

Host Kristen Welker said, “What are you seeing online in the wake of this shooting? Is anything standing out to you?”

Collins said, “I will say that the months-long campaign of targeting trans and gay rights events and supports and things like drag brunches, that has been a persistent narrative by the anti-LGBQ right in the last six months to the last year. One of the main drivers of that hate is an account called Libs of TikTok.”

Welker said, “You said this, but we I think we can’t emphasize this enough. This was during a drag night.”

Collins said, “And also hours before what they call an all-ages drag brunch which is probably the number one target of these anti-LGBTQ events recently. For example, the Proud Boys will go and protest any drag brunch, any drag story hour, anything that a child might go to meet a drag queen, just to show them they’re human beings and people. They go there, and they read Dr. Seuss there. They read regular books, but it is read by a drag queen, and they have breakfast. It is not some hypersexual event, but that’s what it’s viewed as on the far right.”

Oh, izzatso? Then why, pray tell, do you have to do it in drag? If all it really IS about is “reading Dr Seuss to children,” as you so speciously claim, then just do it in regular street clothes. It shouldn’t be necessary for you to don full-on Freak regalia and turn yourself into an outrageous, disturbing parody of what you perceive a woman to be. By wearing casual slacks or even just jeans and a T-shirt, you’ll thereby avoid any potential hassle with justly-irate parents who, unfortunately for you, are onto your little game.

But that just doesn’t have quite the same appeal to you, now does it? Doesn’t quite fire your rockets. So instead, we get this:

Authentic my ass — *It’s all about the litt-rachure, H8TRRRZ*

Yeah, tell me the above obviously mentally-diseased dude ain’t getting his rocks off with his little shitshow.

Whatever the hell is going on here, Dr Seuss ain’t got a thing in the world to do with it, beyond acting as an enabling step along the way to achieving that delightful little frisson of, yes, sexual ecstasy so powerfully alluring to degenerate Groomers like these. Sorry, bub, you’re gonna have to peddle that bushwa someplace else; ain’t no market for it here, I’m afraid.

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1

Trickles

Posted on November 21, 2022 by SteveF

You suspect that your wife is having an affair so you start looking for evidence. You find it, so you accuse her. She denies it so you show her a piece of evidence. She at first denies that it’s real, then accuses you of spying on her, then explains it away, then admits that, yes, she was at a bar with her handsome coworker when she had told you that she had to work overtime, but they finished the project early and went to celebrate before going home and that’s all there was and anyway he’s married.

You show her the next bit of evidence and she DARVOs again before admitting that, yes, they went to a hotel but that was only because he was too drunk to drive so she brought him there and that’s all that happened.

You show her the next bit of evidence… The truth is admitted only in trickles.

Or take another scenario: A government agency has been accused of violating not only the law but the Constitution and the ordinary expectations of decent treatment for honest citizens. The department spokesman denies the accusation. The next day, after proof of, say, warrantless surveillance having been conducted has been revealed on the morning talk shows, the spokesman acknowledges that it appears that a person may have been investigated without all the paperwork being in order. The next day, he admits that the problem may go further than first realized. And so on, with the admissions never, ever going beyond what’s been publicly demonstrated and usually not going even that far.

Or say a politician has been caught taking money from an unregistered foreign agent. Deny deny deny, well, yes, she had hired my consulting services and it was all aboveboard and I just haven’t gotten around to writing the invoice yet, deny deny, I regret that my actions gave the appearance. Once again, no admission going further than what the evidence proves has happened and counter-accusations fly just as thick as the explanations and the non-apologies.

There may be a reason that most men don’t trust women, bureaucrats, or politicians.

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1

2

Spiteful mutants

Posted on November 21, 2022 by Mike

If you should ever wonder about who it is that really rules us, well, there’s your answer.

In a high-trust society, you can take risks, like trying to invent a better plow or a better way to preserve food. You can also question official orthodoxy without fear of being killed, so new ideas can get room to breathe. European people made the modern world because they reward improvement. If you can produce a better way, even if it offends a rich person, you will be rewarded.

What all of this points to is that within every human population there is a defect rate and those defects have consequences. Some of the defects turn out to be harmless, like stupid people who can be employed in simple labor. Other defects can be quite harmful, like murderers and rapists. As evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton points out, some of these defects result in spiteful mutants.

Spiteful mutants are the men in dresses demanding everyone pretend they are some third sex rather than a lunatic. These are the feminists who make war on the normal sexual relations of society. The people policing speech online and inflicting Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs are spiteful mutants. These are the human defects slowly making life impossible in Western countries.

Professor Dutton points out that we used to have social mechanisms for minimizing the impact of human defects. The death penalty is the extreme example, but social pressure reduced mating opportunities. The scold’s bridle was used to control what we now call feminists. Of course, most of what we think of as feminists were called witches in the past and properly burned at the stake.

Because we have systematically dismantled these mechanisms for minimizing the impact of human defects, we are now being overrun by them. Western societies are becoming unbearable due to the spiteful mutants. They have infected every aspect of society to the point where things are starting to break down. Even basic things like elections are proving impossible due to these mutants.

The various claims made by evolutionary psychology with regards to the impact of things like the death penalty are far from proven. In fact, they probably will never be fully tested because we lack the data. What these claims do is provide a useful framework for explaining the rise of Europe starting around 1500. They help us shape the narrative and make further research more productive.

They also help us understand the current crisis. The forces that increased the stock of human capital in Europe are now in reverse. Instead of reducing the proportion of defective people, social forces are now increasing their numbers. Like the inflection point in 1500, when European progress suddenly turned upward, we are approaching an inflection point where things suddenly turn much worse. This will not end well.

Yep. We made the mistake of giving the spiteful mutants an inch, and as they always and forever do, they took everything from us.

3

The Daily Donnybrook

Posted on November 20, 2022December 4, 2022 by SteveF

Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

The making of a martyr

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

Mike’s Iron Law #873 remains in effect: They will NOT stop. They will have to BE stopped.

Third Time’s a Charm For Merrick Garland
Would Merrick Garland have wheeled out the old special counsel wheeze absent Trump’s announcement that he was running for president again?

Of course he would’ve. As I’ve said till I’m blue in the face, the Swamp will hound and persecute Trump until they can finally get him behind bars, the better to close out the books on him by Epsteining the poor schlub shortly thereafter.

Sure, this will be the third special counsel assigned to harass Donald Trump, the most investigated American president in history. It would be nice if Garland could lure Robert Mueller out from his Golden Pond activities to take on the attack against the once and possibly future president once more. I suspect, though, that Mueller is too deep in Bidenesque (or Fettermanesque) mental twilight to mount that steed again. Maybe Garland can harness up the despicable Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s brain and primary dogsbody in the now thoroughly discredited “Russian collusion” delusion.

The predicates for the new special counsel are not too promising. One has to do with Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, when some of his supporters, along with lots of FBI plants masquerading as Trump supporters, marched on the U.S. Capitol. The other has to do with what classified documents Trump may have sequestered at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the presidency.

The first is unpromising because, notwithstanding the exertions of loopy Liz Cheney to demonstrate his culpability for the January 6 jamboree, Trump had nothing to do with the almost entirely peaceful Capitol breach. His last two tweets that day (just a day or two before he got thrown off the platform) cannot have pleased the future CNN or MSNBC hostess Cheney:

I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order—respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!

Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

Not much to work with there, Liz, but as a famous Russian once said, “Show me the man and I will find you the crime.”

“Unpromising,” Kimball says, as if AG Lavrentiy Garland cared one whit about what’s true and what is demonstrably not. As if the “American” “Justice” Dept had anything whatever to do with anything even remotely resembling justice. As if the FUSA still had any kind of “rule of law” in place to check such evil skullduggery. I have to believe that, deep down, Kimball knows all this.

We do know, however, that when it comes to government harassment, “the process is the punishment.” The state has unlimited resources with which to torment people it doesn’t like, and on that list of people it doesn’t like, Donald J. Trump gets star billing.

It has long been clear that America now operates under a two-tier judicial system. Notice that I did not say a “two-tier system of justice.” Absent the virtue of impartiality, there is no justice. There is a flagrant absence of impartiality in the contemporary American judiciary. How else could Joe Biden, who obviously profited from his family’s foreign connections in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere, go uninvestigated? How else could Hunter Biden escape any serious scrutiny? You can add Hillary Clinton and a large cast of Democratic apparatchiks from the FBI and our intelligence services to that list.

But let’s say you were wandering around the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, 2021: Pow! you are caught up in a nationwide dragnet and tossed into a Washington gulag for many months before you are treated to a biased trial. If you are Steve Bannon and you refuse a congressional subpoena, you are indicted, convicted, and given jail time. If you are Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s “wingman” and attorney general, exactly nothing happens to you.

The establishment hates Donald Trump for many good reasons. He did a lot to wreck their concessions during his first term and, should he again win the presidency, the gloves would be off and their gravy train would be over.

I suspect that Michael Anton is right: They can’t let him back in because Trump’s attack on the regulatory “deep state” with all its globalist affiliations would bring their elitist party to an abrupt end. “The people who really run the United States of America,” Anton wrote, “have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”

He most certainly will NOT be. And even if Trump somehow miraculously manages to slip by them as in 2016, he will be stymied exactly as he was the first time out. By many of the very same people who put the arm on back then, actually.

There IS a bright side to all this, however, even if it won’t be a lot of help to one Donald John Trump in the interim: martyring him could well prove to be the proverbial spark that sets off a long-smoldering powderkeg of righteous rage and retribution at long, long last, leading to a potential grassroots uprising that would make the phonus-balonus J6 FBInsurrection look like the debutante’s cotillion it so truly was. In which case, scoundrels like Garland and the rest of the Swamp rats might finally get what’s coming to them, and Justice will finally be visited upon them.

Update! As should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his reliably brilliant work, I couldn’t resist a look at the Mike Anton piece linked above by Kimball, which had somehow gotten by me when it first appeared back in July.

Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.

Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.

Again, why? I think it’s because, while Trump’s core MAGA agenda is decidedly not outside the historic bipartisan mainstream, it is well outside the present regime’s core interests. Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three. The old America—the one in which Republicans cared about the heartland and weren’t solely valets to corporate power, Democrats were pro-worker and anti-war, and Bill Clinton and The New York Times could advocate border security—is in the process of being replaced, if it hasn’t already been, by one in which there is only one acceptable opinion on not just these, but all other issues.

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

Yep, Anton is bang on point yet again. From there, he rolls up his sleeves to delve right into the real nitty-gritty of the whole shebang, and as usual, it’s a wonder to behold.

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The New (Ab)Normal

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

When They Are Trying to Kill Us, Do Their Motives Matter?

Not as far as I’m concerned they don’t, no.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

From new potentially deadly synthetic pathogens to blocking the sun, our aspiring masters are attacking life from multiple angles

A recent preprint reports on a new engineered variant that showed an 80% disease mortality rate in humanized mice

While that particular result was based on humanized mice, so was the approval of the new bivalent boosters

In practical terms, debates about the crazies’ motives matter less than protecting ourselves from their assaults, whether they think of themselves as saviors or just like killing people

The paradox of this moment is that under pressure, we have a chance to remember why we are here and to celebrate and honor our life’s purpose

This story is about living in a world run by crazy people with access to powerful technology. This is the world we are in. We are in a world run by genocidal maniacs. It is our life. It is our challenge. So what do we do?

Captain Mal knew the answer to that as well as you and I do.

Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of the thing, shall we?

One of the main objections from respectable people is that there could be corruption — even bad corruption — but surely, no evil motives, and the reason for that is that we live in a “normal” world in which large scale conspiracies don’t happen. When I get to that part of the conversation, I usually say, very sincerely, that I don’t care if the people bringing destruction to our species think of themselves as saviors or just like killing.

In my recent article called, “What is a Conspiracy?” I argued that “it is possible that Klaus Schwab believes his own b*****t and thinks that the Great Reset is good for our species. But does it matter? Most likely, even classic serial killers follow their own internal logic that makes them “not villains” — but none the less they are killing, and conspiring to do so! And, on a side note, there is nothing new about the practice of combining one’s “missionary obsession” with personal profit!”

The history of our species is proof that genocides are not a figment of imagination and not an abstraction — and while it is usually hard to scholastically “prove” a genocide in real time due to the proximity and the narrow view of the observer, people in the West seem to be dying at a higher rate than usual and giving birth at a slower rate than usual. And it’s only been two years of the “new normal!”

Is it a genocide in the making? It is a case of careless poisoning of human beings? Honestly, talking about this in a scholarly manner feels like a request to please be a good girl, take a spade, and dig out a hole in the ground that may or may not be used as our own grave. Sorry this is not normal. Not normal!

Well, for certain values of the word “normal,” perhaps. All the above is well and good, but the author closes with one of the most piss-poor, flaccid suggestions for a palliative I believe I ever did see.

It’s never easy. I promised to give my personal answer to coping with an onslaught of “crazy.” My personal answer is faith in the power of the universe and praying for courage, clarity, and protection. It sounds simple but it takes a lot of work to leave behind the intellectual habits of “smart, educated people” and go back the primal feeling of how people felt about the world for maybe millions of years.

Uh HUH. So you’ve decided you’re just gonna roll over and die, then.

Jeez Louise. She responds to credible threats of actual, literal genocide—to wit, and I quote: “not a figment of imagination, not an abstraction”—with “faith in the power of the universe”? Ummm, yeah, no. I definitely prefer the Malcolm Reynolds approach, myself.

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1

Liberal arts revolution?

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

A revolution due, and well past due.

It took the post-war prosperity and a culture of pleasure to finally throw off the verities of Western Civilization, and in that process the throwing away of education in real things in favor of notional things that would serve a progressive agenda. The liberal arts were repurposed to a radical form of groupthink, a new anti-liberalism in education. At its best in the last fifty years, higher education serves only Mammon, getting the graduate good connections and high-paying careers. Thus the liberal arts became servile arts.

When the liberal arts seemed destined for shipwreck, three men stood up and decided to do something radical at a state university. They decided to engage in an Experiment in Tradition.

These three men were John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick, and their experiment was the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas. This writer was a student in this program in the seventies in Kansas. It started small. But I have seen it grow into an international educational movement, with many colleges, primary schools, and curricula based on the educational philosophy of John Senior and the practice of the IHP.

Their revolution was to expose students to real things, to delight in memorizing poetry, song, stargazing, observation of nature, and the great books. This brought out a dormant sense of awe and wonder in students. This was the necessary ingredient to philosophy and all true education, according to Plato and Aristotle, and to Newman.

Students were not taught to dissect the great and good books of Western culture, but instead to understand them, to be receptive to ancient wisdom – in the sense of really seeing as Joseph Pieper explains in Leisure: the Basis of Culture. The emphasis was not on mastery over the world, but on loving the works.

In the IHP students learned that truth was knowable, in nature, great books, poetry, great art, and science. This sort of education allows for experiential or connatural learning, focused on internalizing what is studied, attuned to the senses as well as the intellect. Students came to realize they had been indoctrinated in ignorance of real education, and the IHP provided a remedy. In fact, John Senior said what they were doing was remedial, since students lacked the necessary preparation for a traditional classical education.

Other professors and administrators were threatened by this highly successful program. It had to be suppressed. You just couldn’t allow students to run around talking about truth as if it could be known. It was the beginning of what we now know as political correctness, the liberal orthodoxy that admitted of only one direction – “progress” away from the West and the jettisoning of our Judeo-Christian patrimony.

The university held hearings, parading students to testify about Jewish conversions, attitudes about women that were too traditional, education that was too retrograde, not open to new ideas. In short, after nearly ten years of success, this program had to be done in, because it was too “controversial.” The radicalism of the sixties was not too controversial, nor was sexual experimentation, nor the embrace of every odd philosophy and cult. But a return to our roots, or at least an exploration of what was good or potentially worth knowing in Western Culture – that was revolutionary. The experiment in tradition had to be killed, as it were, death by administration.

But as with all excellent ideas, it is harder to kill them than you might think. The great revenge of IHP is that this experiment in the liberal arts bore great fruit, and it continues to bear fruit in numerous vocations to marriage and large families, in two American bishops and numerous monks and nuns, in a monastery in Oklahoma where vocations are exploding, in the founding of a college based on the great books in the great outdoors, and in the many other returns to sanity based on their pedagogical experiment.

Many have retreated in the face of cancel culture on campuses. But it is not a time for retreat. It is a time to re-engage, to start a new revolution of the liberal arts, the kind Newman had in mind, one program at a time, one school at a time, one repurposed curriculum at a time, at the primary level, and in colleges or universities that seem moribund and incapable of a return to education in real things.

We’ve discussed many times around these here parts the essential first step of reclaiming the academy from the iron clutches of the Left gargoyles who have, to our enormous cost, so effectively usurped it, if we seriously hope to reclaim our country over the longer term. It is heartening indeed to learn of a successful campaign aimed at doing precisely that. Even so, Porretto sounds something of a somber, cautionary note.

Too many are talking about rebellion as if it were exclusively a political act. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebellion may end in arms, but it begins in the mind…

The cited column ends on a hopeful note, but be warned: hope looks not to the present but the future, and the future is not fixed in shape. The mental rebellion kindled by those three daring educators – real educators this time, in contrast to the sort that usually parade the title – might have left seeds, if not at the University of Kansas, then perhaps elsewhere, that will germinate yet.

We can but hope. Regardless, hats off to Senior, Quinn, and Nelick for their most noble effort.

4

Semper fidelis

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

It’s a crying shame she “lost,” really.

Kari Lake Responds to Speculation She May Drop Trump After Midterms

Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake responded to speculation that she could be a conservative star if she pivots away from former President Donald Trump, who had endorsed her.

“If she concedes graciously in the coming days and weeks, then I think there could be a path for her in the future in politics in Arizona,” political consultant Lorna Romero told the Washington Examiner this week, adding that “it still seems like she is mulling over a potential lawsuit over the way Maricopa County handled the election” and if Lake “goes down that route, I think she will forever be branded as a Trump-type candidate.”

“I think her political career in Arizona will be over. At that point, her only path would be to be on a conservative talk show somewhere,” Romero said.

After the Washington Examiner published its story on Twitter, Lake responded: “Never.”

And with that, it becomes not only clear but inarguable that, insofar as she DID “lose,” the loss wasn’t hers alone, but every Real American’s as well.

“President Trump announces his ‘24 Presidential run,” she wrote on Truth Social following the former president’s announcement that he will make a third bid for the White House. “He has my complete and total endorsement!”

During the Republican primary, Lake received Trump’s endorsement, allowing her to win the party’s nomination over a candidate who was backed by current Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and former Vice President Mike Pence.

Don’t be a stranger, ma’am. The more we hear from you, the better off we’re all going to be for it, win, lose, or draw.

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