www.thornwalker.com/ditch/stopcollection_2017.htm
 


 

Stop and think,  collected — 2018

Note. Because of changes in the archive pages, over time, you may find that some of the links you hit to other "Stop and think" installments actually lead nowhere. If you encounter frustration with a particular link, please feel free to hold my feet to the fire. — Nicholas Strakon

2017     2016     2015    2014    
2013      2012     2011     2010    
2009     2008     2007     2006    
2005     2004     2003     2002     
 

Comment?
 
Reader responses
 

Ronn Neff: Much of the legacy of Western civilization that survives does so for two reasons: (1) SJW thugs have not yet gotten around to attacking it; and (2) what passes for their own education (immersing themselves in studies in "being a good ally" or "desert island racial resolutions" or "cultural appropriation in Terrytoon animations") has left them ignorant of many of those achievements.

I figure our luck can't last forever, though, and sooner or later they will be pouncing. So if you've never seen The Mikado, maybe you should make a point of catching it. For that matter, there is (for the time being, anyway) a full-length YouTube video of a D'Oyly Carte production. It takes only a couple of minutes to see that this is nothing less than a Japanese minstrel show, and simply cannot be tolerated.

As for Madama Butterfly and Turandot, surely they must be barred from performance as being hurtful cultural appropriations. Whether Aida can survive is anyone's guess. (December 2018)


"We don't live in a free country. It's dangerous to believe you do." That's from "Unequal Justice in Fields Charlottesville Trial — and, Increasingly, Throughout the Left's America," by "Charlottesville Survivor," at VDare, December 14, 2018. Highly recommended. (December 2018)


Ronn Neff: Once the Red Guards find out that the Sioux owned slaves, are we not going to have to change the names of North and South Dakota?

Also, I'll bet there are plenty of rivers in the United States that will have to be renamed because the tribes after which they have been named owned slaves.

The Miami Indians kidnapped (Wikipedia says "adopted") Frances Slocum. "Miami"! That's not just a county in Indiana! Think of all the rivers and places that should be renamed. We have to stop honoring such actions. And by the way, given that Miss Slocum was probably raped, I think #MeToo should get on board with this movement.

And by the way, isn't the name "Indiana" hurtful to Indians? (December 2018)


David T. Wright: The United State owns the world. Well, we already knew that was the idea, but you really have to wonder what is going on in our rulers' little pin heads when they have the citizen of a foreign, sovereign country arrested in another foreign country, on unspecified charges:

"Huawei arrest: China demands release of Meng Wanzhou," BBC News, December 6, 2018.
China, right. She isn't just some schlub from some backwater country, but the CFO of a giant electronics firm, Huawei, based in China, of all places! The crime? Apparently that Huawei dared to trade with Iran without the permission of our enlightened mandarins.

So here we have a "crime" that was not committed by a U.S. citizen, and not on U.S. soil or in any way within the jurisdiction of the United State. But the Empire sees no problem with arresting a high-ranking Chinese businesswoman — in Canada!

Here's the thing, too. Many of the tech firms in China are actually owned partly, sometimes wholly, by the People's Liberation Army. Even if this one isn't, the Chinese regime is pretty touchy about this sort of thing. Is this a deliberate provocation, an attempt to force a confrontation? Are those people drunk? (December 2018)


Ronn Neff: Donald Trump took a lot of heat when he said that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel ("appointed by Barack Obama," the media dutifully tell us), who ruled against him in a class-action case, ruled unfairly and that his "ethnicity" or "heritage" (the euphemisms for "race") played a role in that. Paul Ryan (who had no dog in the fight) weighed in on the issue by saying, "Claiming a person can't do the job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment. I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It's absolutely unacceptable."

And yet that is PRECISELY the sort of thing that identity politics not only tells us but enjoins us to take into account: there must be black judges and women judges and Mexican judges and Muslim judges so that they can see things the way blacks, women, Mexicans, and Muslims see things, and rule accordingly. In other words: white male judges cannot do their jobs because they are white males. (I do not believe that Paul Ryan ever said any such thing about the claims made for the importance of having non-white female Supreme Court justices when they were up for confirmation, presumably because he had no dog in those fights.)

Identity politics has even now explicitly attacked the most basic democratic fiction: that one person, by virtue of an election, can represent a mass of people, even among those who did not vote for him. Now we must have Mexicans, Hawaiians, Indians, blacks, and Muslims in the legislatures so that those people can be "represented."

The only person who imagines he can represent everyone is Dys-Lexi O-C.

Update, November 29: See what I mean?
"Jay-Z says panel is 'too white' to be fair in trademark case," by Rebecca Rosenberg and Julia Marsh, Page Six, November 28, 2018.

(December 2018)


Ronn Neff: You'd think leaving something like the European Union would be pretty easy. It wasn't all that difficult to get into it, after all.

But it seems there is one difficulty after another. "Brexit" turns out to be pretty complicated.

Freedom-lovers who like big talk about secession and other separation should take note. (November 2018)


Nicholas Strakon: If this utopianism is sincere ...

I saw this in one of Politico's e-mail roundups today:

ALERT FOR MAR-A-LAGO ... AP'S MARK SHERMAN: "Roberts criticizes Trump for 'Obama judge' comment": "Chief Justice John Roberts is pushing back against President Donald Trump's description of a judge who ruled against Trump's new migrant asylum policy as an 'Obama judge.'

"It's the first time that the leader of the federal judiciary has offered even a hint of criticism of Trump, who has previously blasted federal judges who ruled against him.

"Roberts said Wednesday the U.S. doesn't have 'Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.' He commented in a statement released by the Supreme Court after a query by The Associated Press.

"Roberts said on the day before Thanksgiving that an 'independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.'"

Cinephiles may remember a scene in the movie "Stalin" (1992) in which Molotov says something inane and Stalin (played by Robert Duvall) tells him, "Molotov, you are an idiot. You will go far."

John Roberts has gone far. (November 2018)


Ronn Neff: Streisand awakens. In her interview with ABC (about 1:50), Barbra Streisand asks (referring to Donald Trump), "How does someone who lies that much sleep at night?"

We are happy that Miss Streisand's dormant sensitivities on this matter have finally woken up, and we agree that her question deserves an answer. Miss Streisand is fortunate in having easy access to a friend (lover?) who can perhaps give her some insight on the matter: Bill Clinton. (November 2018)


Ronn Neff: A bad assumption. Federalist Paper No. 45 is one of the few from which there is a passage that gets quoted often: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite."

Not quoted so often — and indeed laughable in light of the "secret resistance" within the Trump administration — is this gem, from the same Paper:

"The number of individuals employed under the Constitution of the United States, will be much smaller, than the number employed under the particular States. There will consequently be less of personal influence on the side of the former, than of the latter." (November 2018)


Ronn Neff: With the way feminists take umbrage and manage to get people fired, will someone please explain to me why Jimmy Kimmel has a top late-night show? Doesn't anyone remember "The Man Show"? And the Juggies?

I mean, high-flyin' guys can get fired for wondering aloud whether there's some reason that women aren't techies. Or mathematicians. And Kimmel gets away with the Juggies on trampolines? In slow motion? (November 2018)


Ronn Neff: The Left, loud and cryptic. When Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) tried to explain his vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh, he was drowned out by "protesters" (actually hired thugs) who repeated "Shame! Shame! Shame!"

Since it is clear that they had no interest whatever in trying to understand what he was saying, the incident suggested two questions to me. First, what did the "protesters" expect to achieve by their chants? Anything useful? And perhaps more interesting, what do they mean by "shame"? It's a word one hears more and more frequently in videos of events where there are "protesters," especially on university campuses.

I think it has changed its meaning slightly in recent years, but I cannot say that I understand just how. (October 2018)


Ronn Neff: Naaahhh. Suppose that the continued FBI investigation of Brett Kavanaugh's past turns up absolutely nothing that undermines his claims of innocence. Does anyone believe that that result will change a single Democrat vote? (October 2018)


“Natasha Fatale”: Sir — The other night (I think it was) when I was at a bar having a few Mojitos, I was approached by a man who said he was a staffer for Dianne Feinstein. He didn't give me his name, but he offered me $50,000 to say I had been sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh when I was a student at Yale. I never met Kavanaugh, so I turned him down.

I cannot give you my real name or tell you just when or where this happened, because what with all the death threats that Christine Blasey Ford and Jeff Flake have gotten, and that Sarah Palin used to get, it just isn't safe to be too visible these days.

But I assure you that what I have said is true, and I want the press to know about it. I think there should be an FBI investigation into Feinstein's office. At least I think he said that's where he was from. (October 2018)


Ronn Neff: Acronymph. If I rearrange the letters alphabetically (because I like alphabetical order) and speak of people who are BGLT, am I being insensitive? Would I lose my job if I were a journalist? Is the actual order of the letters mandatory? (September 2018)


Ronn Neff: More twisting. On September 4, the Washington Post ran "Gun control or gun rights? The answer may help determine whether Rep. Comstock wins reelection," by Jenna Portnoy.

It begins: "As the nation grapples with mass shootings, gun policy could be a deciding factor in the competitive race between Rep. Barbara Comstock (R) and Democratic challenger state Sen. Jennifer T. Wexton in Northern Virginia." Notice the collective mind-reading. Reader, are you grappling with mass shootings?

In paragraph 5 we read, "Voters in Virginia believe gun control is more important than protecting gun rights, according to a recent poll that captured a watershed moment in a once-conservative state."

You would expect that in a website posting of the story that the phrase "a recent poll" would be a hyperlink, directing the reader to the relevant poll. No such luck.

In paragraph 29 (!) we learn that the poll is a Roanoke College Poll, according to which (says the Post), "48 percent of likely voters think it's more important to control gun ownership than to protect the right of Americans to own guns; 44 percent believe gun rights are paramount."

It is in this paragraph that we get the hyperlink: www.roanoke.edu/Documents/rcpoll/August%202018%20politics%20Topline.pdf.

The Post accurately reports the results for question #18 ("Finally, what do you think is more important — to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?"), although the numbers are not all that different from the results for the same question in January 2015.

But look back up to question #8. You will see that 25 percent either had no opinion or refused to answer the question: "What is the most important issue to you in this election?" Gun control (along with six other issues) came in ELEVENTH, with 1 percent answering that it was most important.

Did the Washington Post lie? Did it err? It did not. Did it deliberately try to mislead readers? Yes.

More than that, with its — well, let's call it "disinformation" — it is trying to affect the outcome of the election.
 

In June 2012 the Post ran a lengthy feature on Virgil Goode, the Constitution Party's candidate for president that year. They pretended to fret that Goode's candidacy "would shave votes from" Mitt Romney. Of course, given that they had never done such a feature on any other Constitution Party presidential candidate, one suspects that they were in fact expecting and even hoping that by giving Goode more publicity than he could ever afford to purchase, they might accomplish exactly that which they pretended to fear.

Did the Post lie? Did it err? It did not. Was it trying to affect the outcome of the election?
 

By the way, we keep hearing that Russian trolls tried to affect the 2016 election, favoring Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Does anyone else find it interesting that we are not told what the trolls said?
 

More and more it is apparent that the job of the major media is not to tell us what is happening, but what they want us to believe is happening. And what they want to happen. Apparently they believe that to say X makes X true. That is, they believe in magic. (September 2018)


Ronn Neff: The frenzy over John McCain's death has underscored the media and the Left's views of Republicans: The only good Republican is a dead Republican. (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: The welfare of empire. In the October 28, 1996, issue of The Last Ditch, Phil Collier wrote, "In a sense, one can say that the welfare state is a bribe to keep the population in line to support the empire."

If it is true that empire requires a welfare state, does it not follow that empire also requires domestic poverty? If so, the question naturally arises, Where will it get this poverty? Will it create it? Or import it?

To be sure, the policies of our permanent state will guarantee poverty. Or at least impoverishment. But it must be careful here, first because there is a limit to how much an empire can pay in welfare and maintain the military strength necessary to project imperial effect; and second, because an impoverished people who have experienced comfort often become a resentful people, a rebellious people, an insubordinate, and even insurgent people. Far better to try to control the level and extent of poverty to which the state reduces them, and import the needed poverty.

Far better to import an already impoverished people who find U.S. "poverty" an improvement over their lives at home, and the remains of what liberty are to be found in America more desirable than the tyranny they experience at home. In this speculation, does it follow that mass Third World immigration (including Muslim immigration) supply imperial need?

On this view, mass immigration from Third World and Muslim countries results in the necessity and expansion of welfare payments, both as a matter of fact and as a matter of design. And the payment of welfare benefits makes empire palatable. Does it follow that the purpose of allowing mass immigration from Third World and Muslim countries is to prop up empire? Does mass immigration "feed" empire?

And further, are the supporters of that immigration who also oppose empire and foreign intervention thereby caught up in political, if not logical, incoherence? (August 2018)


Ronn Neff and Nicholas Strakon: Yet another turn of the screw, thanks to the commie-fascist banking industry: "David Horowitz: Visa, Mastercard Cut Off Payments to My Think Tank Based on SPLC 'Hate Group' Label," by Lucas Nolan, Breitbart, August 23, 2018.

Strakon used to think of the Dark Suits and Red Guards as somewhat distinct wings of the ruling class. He's now wondering whether it's better to think of Dark Red Suits.

We're both wondering how long it will be before the banksters cut off the personal credit cards of people whom the comrades denounce for thoughtcrime.

Can it be as long as five years?

When it happens, you may be sure that certain "libertarians" will pop up to exclaim that those decisions must be respected, and never criticized, for they were made by purely private companies, freely exercising their freedom in our free-market system.
 

Modine Herbey wonders about something. What's all this I've been hearing about the SPLC's losing credibility even with many of the Respectables? When does that actually kick in with the established institutions of our free society with a free market dedicated to freedom? (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: Jones, Aaronson, Rutherford ... and Cohen! It has not received much attention in the press, but Michael Cohen also confessed to the sabotage of Southwest Airlines flights, of having devised plans to collapse overpasses on I-70, and to tampering with the computer records of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, depriving hundreds of needy families of the hope of ever achieving self-sufficiency. He also confessed to having used obscene epithets when speaking of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, and of having compassed the collapse of the welfare state in Namibia.

He threw himself on the mercy of the court, begging for punishment that will cure him of his many crimes and perhaps restore him to a position in society where he can work for the greater good. (August 2018)

Aide-mémoire: Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.


Nicholas Strakon: I have a dream ...

... of a world where "Literally Stalin" is also a thing. (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: I was just thinking of the outrage against the Trump administration's separating of children from their parents, and my mind wandered into a little cavity where I had stored the memory of Elizabeth Morgan.

I'm trying to remember what kind of outrage there was against separating little Hilary Foretich from her father. Probably none, because (to rely on somewhat biased accounts) he was widely thought to be an unfit father. But did anyone object to Elizabeth Morgan's separating the child from her mother (that is, from herself)? In other words, Elizabeth Morgan (excuse me, that's Dr. Elizabeth Morgan) separated the child from both of her parents, and that seemed to upset no one (except the maligned father and his supporters).

Just sayin'. (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: Why all the fuss about closing the white-black gap in education? I say, Let's close the Asian-white gap.

(As for closing the Asian-black gap, good luck with that.) (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: Who's next? Uber? McDonald's? Big Pharma?

In this story, we learn how the universities and trade unions are lining up with Antifa to suppress a protest. And AirBnb, too, apparently:

"White Supremacists Are Planning a Second 'Unite the Right' Rally in D.C.," by Amanda Arnold, The Cut, undated.
The next one provides more information about AirBnb's plans. Catch the stuff about the outfit's "Community Commitment":
"Airbnb says it may kick out Unite the Right rally participants in DC: report," by Michael Burke, The Hill, August 9, 2018.
When polite totalitarianism advances under the banner of words such as "community commitment" — a euphemism for "like what we like"? — it is very polite indeed.
 

Update by Mr. Neff, August 11, 2018.

What was I just saying?

"Multiple DC restaurants plan to refuse service to white nationalists during Unite the Right rally," by John Bowden, The Hill, August 10, 2018. (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: "Diversity is our greatest strength." I guess we started hearing that during the Clinton administration. And we immediately rejected it and made fun of it.

It occurs to me that we were missing something. As I see just how powerful that slogan has been in controlling education and business, how it has protected the immigration and integration policies of the state, I think that ol' Bill was actually telling us something useful and important.

We just never thought to ask who the "our" was in that sentence. Diversity may very well be its greatest strength. (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: Fragility. The Left, always ready to resort to name-calling and ridicule in place of coherent argumentation, has come up with the term "white fragility." It's a disparagement that's supposed to respond (somehow) to whites when they expect standards of behavior and speech to apply equally to whites and non-whites alike. It's a way of trivializing white expectations of proper discourse.

Apparently, such expectations indicate that white people are just too sensitive, too thin-skinned, too quick to take umbrage. So "fragile" that we cannot endure criticism of any sort.

It's a particularly odd derision, given that it is mostly blacks who use it. I say it is odd, because if you want to see what racial fragility looks like, the next time you are speaking to black people use the phrase "you people." Talk about umbrage!!! (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: Wimp Nazis. We have an awfully peculiar crop of Nazis in this country. The one thing you should be able to count on Nazis for is crushing debate. You know ... Book burnings. Firing professors with the wrong ideas. Shutting down businesses. Beating up opponents in the street. Real Brown Shirt stuff.

But we don't see them out there doing any of that. They just whine on the Internet. Sheesh. Now the lefties — especially Antifa ... there you've got some people who can give lessons on how to be a Nazi. They don't mess around. They don't burn books, but they shut down websites. They get professors fired. They shut down businesses and they beat up opponents in the street.

And now they even want to censor public records!

All you Nazis out there ... are you paying attention? Ronn Neff: The unasked question. Last week the Senate Intelligence Committee held hearings concerning outsiders' use of the Internet — especially social media — to "interfere" with U.S. elections.

I waited in vain to hear the one question to which I most wanted the answer:

"Will you please tell us about U.S. government and NGO interference in foreign elections?" (August 2018)


Ronn Neff: My algorithm accidentally ate that dissent! Commentator Candace Owens mimicked some tweets from the New York Times's new editorial board member Sarah Jeong, and her account was suspended.

Owens's tweets explicitly stated that they were parodies of tweets that had not led to the suspension of the writer. All Owens did was substitute the word "Jewish" for "white."

Despite all the publicity Sarah Jeong's tweets have received, her account was not suspended.

When Twitter "accidentally" suspends an account — which seems to happen more to conservative accounts than to liberal ones — they say it was just a fluke in their algorithms. No bias on their part. I think this incident shows us pretty clearly that that is a bald-faced lie. (August 2018)


Ronn Neff and Nicholas Strakon: Not such a heroic breakthrough for the Revolution after all! Dipping into Taki's Magazine, we find Jim Goad writing, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Theybies Grow Up To Be Cowqueers" (July 23, 2018).

It has to do with parents' deliberately concealing the sex (excuse us! gender!) of their children.

"Progressive," you say? But how dare these adults foist upon their children the oppressive idea that they (the adults) are their "parents"? (We lament our use of age-ist language here and will be performing social service to atone for it.) Don't they know that "parent" is a social construct? We think they should remain anonymous to the children, perhaps putting them in a state-run facility, until the children are mature enough (another social construct having nothing to do with biological age) to choose their own parents. Assuming they want parents. (July 2018)


Edward Morrison Morley: Trump Russian connection takes it to babies. According to the New York Times's Andrew Jacobs, "U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials" (July 8, 2018).

Bear in mind that these people stun easily.

An excerpt:

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly. Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother's milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations....
Horrendous details follow. Not for the faint of heart.

And here's the clincher:

In the end, the Americans' efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
And why not? Don't forget who "the Americans" are here (i.e., the Trump administration). The heart-wrenching baby photo is a puzzler, since there is no hint in the story about how Trump or "the Americans" or whoever contributed to the apparently sad fate of the Brooklyn mother who we are told is unable to nurse, but we can be confident that that dastardly Trump is at the bottom of all this. Perhaps the photo editor inadvertently cropped out a menacing FBI or ICE agent pointing a gun at the innocent bottle-feeding mother (note the baby's apprehensive look). Evidently bottle-feeding is OK if the contents of the bottle are not produced by the baby-formula people. Check follow-up headlines for clarification. Most of the article is just another stream-of-consciousness litany of acts of evil perpetrated by the current regime. (July 2018)


Edward Morrison Morley: What's missing in this headline and teaser from yesterday's New York Times? — "In Daring Underwater Cave Rescue, 4 of 13 Thai Are Freed" / "One by one, the first four members of a youth soccer team to be rescued emerged after a perilous, hourslong swim through tight passageways."

The editors of the NYT are once again sleeping at the switch, in much the same way as when they failed to notice the brilliant "triumph" of then soon-to-be "democratic socialist — pardon the redundancy — media star" Ocasio-Cortez. Here, they fail to blame Donald Trump for this problem, which, at the very least, results from Trump-empowered global warming, which, in turn, is a direct result of his reneging on the Paris climate accords, and an indirect result of policies advocated by his populist (= "fascist") former EPA director Scott Pruitt. There is also, no doubt, a Russian connection involved, one that merits the attention of the Mueller probe. It is also conceivable (= "possible" = "probable" = "indisputable") that Donald, Jr. is involved. Details to follow. (July 2018)


Nicholas Strakon just cannot keep up. In June I used the Miss America pageant's decision to drop its swimsuit competition as grist for a little semi-funny satire (so I thought). I joked that if the pageant were still around in ten years, the trannies would be competing, so the swimsuits perforce would reappear. Ha, ha.

Once again I was napping out behind the barn. Ten years, heck. See the "Week That Perished" column for July 8 at Taki's, and search for "Miss Universe." (Caution: some raw language.)

If the trannies are in Miss Universe already, can Miss America be far behind?

It is as hard to keep up with the madness we are living through as it was to keep up with the monstrous transformations in John Carpenter's "The Thing."


Nicholas Strakon: And when I do try to keep up ... On July 6, I was paying my daily visit to the American Renaissance site (a routine I highly recommend!) when I spotted this headline on the daily menu: "Terry Gilliam on Diversity: 'I Tell the World Now I'm a Black Lesbian.'"

Before I clicked into the story, I took the headline seriously.

In other words, instead of assuming that this old Monty Python member was joking in the old Monty Python style, I assumed that he had become a pod-person.

That's how dismal my expectations are these days. (July 2018)


Mike DiBaggio: Mass propaganda. This Sunday's Mass, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, was reduced to bare propaganda, to the point that my church actually had some hack whip up new lyrics for "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," replacing references to the Passion with stuff about refugee children being ripped from their parents at the border. I wish I were joking.

The bulletin included a mealy-mouthed letter from the Bishop of Allentown, essentially a restatement of the position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that separating children from their parents is never acceptable. As long as they're migrants, anyway. No mention is made of the millions of American children separated from parents who are thrown in jail or face groundless investigations by Child Protective Services. Likewise, no such admonitions are offered against shooting or bombing families in the Middle East. Certainly, I have never heard a homily about those topics, nor were we ever treated to a rewriting of a thousand-year-old hymn for such paltry matters.

The bishop's letter says that "[t]his is not a debate about whether our borders should be secure. They should be, and my brother Bishops and I believe that our government's leaders should take all reasonable steps to keep them that way."

Is that so? Why? A confused reader may well ask what it even means to "secure the border," given that much of the rest of the letter denounces any plan anyone has ever come up with to do so, short of eliminating any barriers to immigration whatsoever. The letter even begins by saying, "Reasonable people may disagree over the best ways to control illegal immigration to the United States," but it goes on to lay out how said reasonable people must agree with the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy about everything from unimpeded migration to amnesty and citizenship for DACA "dreamers." To the bishop's credit, the letter at least dispenses with the emotional manipulation of pretending the migrants are all asylum seekers, instead frankly acknowledging that they are predominantly economic migrants. After years of "Romans 13!" justifications for everything from carpet bombing to water torture, we have now come to the position that breaking the law to get a better job is OK.

In his homily, my priest (a good man and a holy and orthodox priest, let there be no doubt) acknowledged the lack of Church leadership in America today. He rightfully identified the child sex-abuse crisis and other aspects of church corruption as reasons that people aren't listening to the pastors and bishops, but he missed a more glaring problem: the abandonment of the catechism and the general abdication of Catholic moral authority. The silence of the bishops in the face of Catholic politicians who openly support abortion, the silence about American parents who are unjustly separated from their children because of overly punitive and tyrannical laws, the silence about U.S. government torture camps, the implicit and explicit condoning of unjust war with the triumphal celebrations of the military during the Mass — all of these things have taught their lessons.

It's not that people haven't been listening. Oh, no, they've heard you loud and clear. (June 2018)


Nicholas Strakon: Astonishing if true. Kudos to American Renaissance for posting snippage of this piece by Jennifer Rich at The Conversation: "Schools must equip students to navigate alt-right websites that push fake news" (June 19).

Rich starts off: "More than 60 percent of America's middle and high school students rely on alt-right internet sites as credible sources for their research papers. The students are using alt-right sites to write papers on topics that range from free speech and the Second Amendment to citizenship, immigration and the Holocaust."

The "alt-right" "fake news" sites are said to include AmRen and Taki's.

By "astonishing," above, I refer to the purported phenomenon itself. Thoughtcrime on public display is really that widespread? To be honest, it seems odd, but perhaps that's just my congenital pessimism kicking in. True, the innocent lads and lassies probably just Google haplessly into the verboten sites, but you'd think they'd have been trained to recoil in horror by the time they were assigned "research papers."

In any case, one has little hope that the schools will teach students to "navigate" the abhorrent leftism and anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western propaganda in their own curricula.
 

Ronn Neff comments: "Navigate," here, is a euphemism for "dismiss."

Modine Herbey comments: "Research papers"? Assigned in American schools, including government schools? Talk about astonishing!

Henry Gallagher Fields comments: We may be sure, however, that no one will ever cite anything at The Last Ditch. Not even libertarians — so loudly fearless and irreverent — do that. (June 2018)


Ronn Neff: No Sabbatarians here. NPR has announced that it will add an hour to its "news" broadcasts on Saturday and Sunday. They say it is because the news doesn't stop on Friday. I'm more inclined to think that it's because socialist propaganda and attacks on reason and freedom should not rest on Saturday or Sunday.

But maybe I'm being overcritical here. Maybe it's just their way to spend the days in more devout worship of Moloch, or Kali, or whatever god they serve. (June 2018)


Ronn Neff: Bad faith. The Left is flaunting their bad faith again, this time shedding their crocodile tears over the injustice of separating parents from their minor children by the enforcement of immigration laws. If they were sincere, they — like some libertarians — would call for the repeal of all immigration laws. Why don't they? I suggest that it is because as long as there are immigration laws, they have an issue for raising money and tempers.

As for minor children, does anyone believe for a second that they will join the protests to free British dissenter Tommy Robinson, who has three minor children? Of course they won't.

The entire fuss on these terms is absurd anyway. Are they prepared to protest the separation of arrested heroin dealers and drug lords from their families? Surely some of them have minor children. In fact, lots of criminals — actual criminals, not just people guilty of mala prohibita — get separated from their minor children every day. It does not get anyone's panties in a twist.

And you can bet that if they could put Donald Trump in prison, they wouldn't shed any tears for his minor child.

The only time arresting the perpetrator of a crime (malum prohibitum or malum in se) does not separate a parent from a minor child is when she's still pregnant.
 

Comments, June 18.

Modine Herbey: You'd think that a news reporter would tell us just what happens to those children separated from their parents. Or that some politician or "activist" would spill. You know, if it's really terrible, that would prop up their point. So what happens to the bambinos? Are they put in a British workhouse? Are they sent to be trained as tiny gardeners tending tiny gardens? Are they adopted by Angelina Jolie?

Actually, what happens is that they are put in centers where HHS takes care of them: feeding them, giving them medical care, and notifying relatives who aren't in prison to come get them (after making sure the relatives won't make them join MS-13).

David T. Wright: It occurs to me that the same people screaming about taking kids from their families are often the same ones who support the courts' taking kids away from their parents for specious reasons.

Douglas Olson: The same fanatics are determined to separate every possible fetus from its mother. (June 2018)


Ronn Neff on the cake-baker's victory at the Supreme Court. I don't want to live in a country where I can refuse doing business with people because it violates my religious convictions. I don't want to live in a country where I can refuse doing business with people because it violates my freedom of expression.

I want to live in a country where I can refuse doing business with people because I don't like them, or because they stink, or because their mother dresses them funny. Or because they're icky. (June 2018)


Nicholas Strakon: Early head-scratchings over Korea. Perhaps you will forgive me for being cautiously hopeful over the apparent results of the Singapore chinwag between the high bosses of North Korea and the United State.

We ought to recognize, though, that Donald Trump's participation was itself an act of intervention, whatever the result — just as Chamberlain and Daladier's going to Munich was an act of intervention. Libertarians demand an immediate, total, and unilateral withdrawal of U.S. imperial forces from the Korean Peninsula.

That said, what has actually happened is maybe not so bad for the cause of peace. (I pray I am not forced to eat my words.)

Nevertheless I have to ask, What Trump will we get tomorrow? And the day after that? And ...? The bellicose protectionist fit he threw at the G7 meeting just before leaving on his Oriental peace mission only reinforces my view of Trump as a man of naturally chaotic mind, of consistent inconsistency.

I wonder whether Trump's neocon handlers are giving him a looser rein in a part of the world they care much less about than the Middle East. Possibly they hope it will give Republicans a bump in November, at little cost. But that might imply that Trump himself harbors genuine, ongoing sentiments that are less than imperialistic, which would contradict my assumption of mental chaos.

At present, the U.S. war ministry is claiming ignorance of any possible bug-out from Korea. But can it be that the Insiders have recognized the limitations of the old empire — groaning under its own weight and challenged by rising world powers — and have decided to cut an acceptable deal with North Korea and withdraw? In view of the legions' overall decline, perhaps the Higher Circles envision a better use for the 2nd Infantry Division than merely sitting about on the demarcation line. Could they be dreaming of yet another African adventure? Or even Iranian? I must try to restrain my dark imaginings.

Further reading: "Trump Got Played in Singapore, but That's a Good Thing," by Jacob G. Hornberger, Future of Freedom, June 13, 2018.

(June 2018)


Nicholas Strakon: A modest prediction. Catching up with the vital news of the world on Facebook, I see that according to Breitbart the Miss America pageant is dropping its swimsuit competition.

One commenter on the post wrote that they might as well make it a radio show now. Another predicted a 90 percent drop in TV ratings.

A third wondered what the pageant will look like in ten years. My notion is that, if it still exists, the trannies will be in it, and the swimsuit competition will perforce have been restored. (June 2018)


Ronn Neff: Now we learn that, according to our adversaries, there are:

Too many white surfers, and also ...

Too many white air-traffic controllers.

I swan! If it ever turned out that non-whites lived longer than whites, there'd be complaints that whites were over-represented in the corpse population. If there's ever a zombie apocalypse, there will probably be too many white zombies. (June 2018)


David T. Wright: The immorelity of the police state. Get this: "Cops Arrive after Maryland Man Posts Photos of Non-Psychedelic Mushrooms on FB."

The headline almost says it all, except that the victims very foolishly allowed the cop into their house, apparently without a warrant, and then had to explain to a disbelieving Officer Meatball what a morel mushroom is. Apparently, his police training did not extend to learning how to use his smart phone to look up "morel" on the Web.

Luckily, a slightly less incompetent plod showed up and enlightened him about the nature of edible mushrooms, after which the police helpfully "processed" the victims' IDs.

Of course, the victims should never have allowed those morons into their house, which left them open to the cops seeing something they could interpret as indication of criminality. There was even the possibility of their maliciously planting evidence, if they had been so inclined and had the brainpower to carry it out. Even after Officer Dimbulb was allowed in, they should have told him politely but firmly to leave once the true nature of the mushrooms became clear. I say "politely," because even though the intruders deserved nothing but contempt, giving any kind of backtalk to police nowadays can instantly land you on the ground with a knee on your neck, or worse.

Instead, the victims allowed the thwarted cops to try to salvage the intrusion, by checking to see if they had any outstanding warrants for spitting on the sidewalk or something. That was a completely gratuitous measure on the part of the invaders, designed to save face and preserve their dominance over the inferior taxpayers. If even the slightest irregularity had emerged, the day might have ended very badly for a couple of innocent nature nuts who like to gather wild mushrooms.

The lesson from this is you just never know when you might be confronted with a mentally challenged Officer of da Law, who is ready to ruin your life for something completely innocent on your part. Beware. (June 2018)


Nicholas Strakon: Orwell again. Another Trump tax increase looms. In its e-mail summary of what's up with the power-crazed enemies who rule us, Politico Playbook today alerts us to a story at the Wall Street Journal:

TRUMP READIES TARIFFS ON CARS — "Trump Administration Looks Into New Tariffs on Imported Vehicles" [paywalled], by WSJ's William Mauldin, Timothy Puko, and Kate O'Keeffe: "The Trump administration is using national-security laws to consider imposing new tariffs on vehicle and auto-parts imports, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. President Donald Trump is asking for new tariffs of as much as 25% on automobile imports, according to those familiar with his request, after he repeatedly signaled his intention to impose such tariffs. Mr. Trump has asked his team to investigate using a legal provision of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act to find whether tariffs or other restrictions are needed on imported cars. It is the same legal justification the administration used to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March."
Yes, comrades, it's the crazily Orwellian "Trade Expansion Act" once again. Are our masters deaf to irony and the reversal of meaning, or do they just think we are?

Anyway, in other news, I hear that Big Brother will soon increase the chocolate ration from thirty grams to twenty grams.

Meanwhile, don't get me started on "national security." Or the fascist New Frontier, circa 1962. (May 2018)


David T. Wright: We predict you'll probably be offended. According to Sidney Fussell in Gizmodo, "The LAPD Uses Palantir Tech to Predict and Surveil 'Probable Offenders'" (May 8, 2018). Fussell writes:

Analysts with the Los Angeles Police Department are reportedly using Palantir software to direct officers to surveil "probable offenders" throughout the city, many of whom are not criminal suspects but have been spotlighted by the company's predictive technology, according to LAPD documents.
Palantir is a company that builds personal dossiers on people by vacuuming up every possible bit of information available on the Net. That's scary enough, but here's the kicker:
As the report notes, a feedback loop emerges: the LAPD targets those with high scores for increased surveillance, but each stop by police further increases their score. Troublingly, analysts are directed to create a minimum of 12 Chronic Offender Bulletins, with five to 10 "back ups" to be switched in as people are arrested. To be removed from the list, an individual has to go two years without contact — a near impossibility if officers are being compelled to make constant contact with them. The LAPD tracks the number of high scoring "offenders" arrested, and officers are expected to report on COB arrests at weekly meetings, In Justice Today found.
That's a little like our credit rating systems, under which your rating takes a hit every time it's queried by a lender. And that reminds me of the "social credit rating" system being used in China. Under that system, minor social infractions, such as saying the wrong thing or dressing improperly, can affect your rating. If you get sideways, it can become a feedback loop, also, as your lower rating affects your ability to get employment and otherwise function in society.

LAPD methods often spread to the rest of the "law enforcement community." It was they who pioneered many of the methods modern cops use to "protect themselves" from us, including shooting first and asking questions later. So it's very possible that this surveillance system is coming to your neighborhood, too. And is it such a leap to imagine it mutating into surveillance not just of conventional criminal types, but of thought criminals as well? (May 2018)


David T. Wright: Well, this is an interesting gambit. Pity poor Robert Mueller. The dutiful hatchet man charged by his fellow ruling-class elites with bringing down the usurper Trump is finding it rough going. After a year and a half, Mueller and his team of vicious anti-Trump lawyers have been unable to come up with any actual evidence of collusion between the hated false Emperor and the evil Designated Hitler, Vladimir Putin. And that was supposedly the whole purpose of his seemingly ill-fated enterprise.

For instance, the story was that the Russians hacked into the Democratic Party's computer servers and publicized embarrassing information regarding the Party's unethical suppression of Bernie Sander's nomination bid. But new evidence now indicates that it was an insider who downloaded the documents onto a thumb drive.

So, to muddy the waters and make it look as if his investigation were going somewhere, he indicted 13 members of a Russian click-bait farm that posted some fake messages and ads on social media sites such as Facebook. In the indictment he charged that the hired internet trolls were actively interfering in the 2016 election and working to defeat Hillary Clinton's campaign for Emperor.

Apparently, however, the indictment is pretty thin gruel legally, and would face problems if challenged in court. For example, the trolls didn't just post anti-Hillary messages. They also went after Trump, as well as posting messages that didn't address the campaign at all, but stirred the pot with issues such as race and religion. And in fact, much of their activity occurred after the election. A friend of mine with knowledge about such things tells me that she thinks the whole effort was an attempt to make money by provoking people to click on pages with advertisements. In any case, the entire effort cost only a few hundred thousand dollars, if that, and may have reached a few thousand people at most. In a campaign in which billions were spent, that's a pretty tiny drop in the bucket.

But Mueller had two things going for him.

1) He could depend on the hysterical support of Democrat (and some Republican) politicians and the Ministry of Truth. For instance, Congresshumanoid Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) proclaimed that the indictment was "absolute proof" that the Russians "attacked" the United State, and that it was the "equivalent" to Pearl Harbor.

2) Mueller brought the indictment calculating that the Russians named therein would stay safely in Russia. After all, there's no way they could be extradited, and what would they have to gain by trying to defend themselves anyway? So the indictment would be moot in any material sense and prevent any necessity of defending it. It could just remain in legal limbo, giving off a stench and adding to the bad publicity being piled on Trump.

Except that now a couple of lawyers have popped up claiming to represent the indicted trolls, who, according to the lawyers, want to defend themselves against the indictment! The only reasonable explanation is that the Russians know that the case is fatally weak. They are demanding discovery, which could make the whole case blow up in Mueller's face when they expose that weakness.

The one thing that Mueller apparently left out of his calculations was the fact that Russians are really big on the game of chess. That game teaches one to carefully consider all available options and their possible consequences, to think ahead, and to fight carefully, but boldly. We've seen one manifestation of this in Russia's outmaneuvering of the U.S. in Syria, though Russia has far fewer resources than the United State. Another is the way that the Russian military has developed an array of weapons that allow a country with a GDP a tenth the size of that of the United State to credibly deter U.S. aggression.

Meanwhile, the U.S. style of confrontation is to roar, bluster, and imitate a bull in a china shop.

This may be very entertaining, indeed. (May 2018)


Ronn Neff: The other day Strakon tipped me to a piece about the established media by John Rappoport at The Daily Bell, "Leaks, Fake News, and Hidden Agendas." Strakon quoted a line from the story, "Big news media decide whether to focus on the WHO or the WHAT, in each case." And he said he liked that line of attack.

I replied that I liked it, too, but that there is so much more:

The media commission a poll. The results become news. That is, the news is what the media decided in advance it would be.

Accusations are made, and the accused says, "These accusations are politically motivated." The story becomes the motivation, not the accusations.

Accusations are made, and the media personalities recite, "This is old news. We've always known this." But they didn't report it when they first knew it.

Then there are all the associations through marriage, employment, or friendship that operate without the public's knowing about them until some kind of blow-up occurs. (During an election, would the electorate think it mattered if a candidate's wife worked for AIPAC? or was an airlines lobbyist? Only if the opponent made something of it.)

Then there's the very tricky one used on Trump with the "golden shower" dossier: The media give fake documents to the FBI, which goes to Trump and says, "You need to be careful. This is the sort of thing that is floating around out there. It's completely false, but you need to know about it anyway." And then the media report that the FBI have a dossier, etc., etc.

A doozy just recently appeared: the two guys who were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks reached a settlement with the city recently: they asked for $1 each and a $200,000 program to help young (i.e., black) entrepreneurs. Headlines announced this, one in the New York Post even saying, "Black men arrested at Starbucks take the high road in their settlement with Philly." If you drill down into the story you find out that the high-roading duo also got a "financial settlement" from Starbucks — amount undisclosed. I'm guessing it wasn't $1 each, since the company offered "to pay for them to complete their [college] degrees."

In a certain sense, there is nothing wrong with the fact that, say, the Washington Post makes the story the "who" rather than the "what." A news outlet has to decide what it's going to focus on. The problem is that all the other major guys "just happen" to do the same thing. And that gives the impression that — if they focus on the "who" — there is no "what" worth talking about. In other words, for them, as is also the case with Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal, there are no competitors in the field. (In the case of PayPal, for a while it was illegal for Americans — though for no one else in the world — to have an account with its one really big competitor, Payoneer.) (May 2018)


Ronn Neff: The migrant threat. I believe I have discovered a possible "unforeseen" consequence of the GOP's latest tax bill.

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore have written an article for the Wall Street Journal — "The Red-State Path to Prosperity" — in which they claim that people are moving from high-tax "blue" states to lower-tax "red" states.

They believe that this has something to do with the provision in the latest tax bill that caps the amount of state income tax that can be deducted from federal income tax. That particular feature was one that Moore was among the first to cheer when the bill was still in draft form. (Did he, I wonder, have something to do with writing that particular provision?)

We were told that a cap on the state-tax deduction would put pressure on high-tax states to reduce their taxes. It is not clear how that will happen if people unhappy with the cap leave those states, while people who can tolerate it remain.

In any case, I suggest that we must consider the possibility that this is another scheme to make sure that the GOP never controls Congress or the presidency again. Why else would anyone be happy that a bunch of voting Democrats (who, after all, are the reason that "blue" states are "blue") are moving into "red" states? (May 2018)


Who cares? Just enjoy ... and hope for more. In "Inside One of America's Ugliest Political Feuds: Cuomo vs. de Blasio" (April 23, 2018), Shane Goldmacher and J. David Goodman of the New York Times ask, how did two Democrats, whose politics and goals often mesh, allow their onetime friendship to deteriorate to the point of pure contempt?

One possibility: both of these politicians are eminently contemptible. [Edward Morrison Morley] (April 2018)


MOR PROPAGDANDA, LES CHIKIN. The New Yorker whinges about the "invasion" of New York City by Christian chicken, in the form of Chick-fil-A: "No matter how well such restaurants integrate into the 'community,' they still venerate a deadening uniformity."

No word about the veneration of a deadening uniformity found in establishment magazine articles. [Edward Morrison Morley] (April 2018)


My take-away from the YouTube shooting: It's okay for vegans to shoot mammals, as long as they don't intend to eat them. [Ronn Neff] (April 2018)


Has anyone noticed that (so far) there haven't been any home-school shootings (even though doubtless some home-school parents are Second Amendment extremists)? [Edward Morrison Morley] (April 2018)


Well, what about blacks? Do you think all those ladies in big colorful hats and white gloves who go to their Baptist church every Sunday could learn anything at this workshop?

"George Washington University to Host 'Christian Privilege' Workshop Days after Easter," by Samuel Smith, April 2, 2018.
Or are lefties just completely tone-deaf? [Ronn Neff]
 

Nicholas Strakon comments: Make sure to catch the mention of "Islamomisia" in the linked article. It immediately became an entry in my New Newspeak dictionary, which I've been compiling for a while. Sooner or later, I probably ought to post what I've got. I encourage readers to send in their own sightings of kooky leftist coinages, including info on where and when they first spotted them. (April 2018)


Scandal in Airstrip One! Namely, "UK's left-wing Labour Party engulfed by anti-Semitism crisis," by Adam Shaw, Fox News.

You can practically hear the Foxers cackling over this.

I myself feel some Schadenfreude, since enough bad things can never happen to Reds.

My general message to them, however, would be: Don't worry, comrades. Ingsoc is safe in the hands of the Tories. (Can I get a rimshot?) [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2018)


The Facebook time-warp plopped something interesting into my feed the other day. (Kudos for the "Friend" who dug it up and posted it.)

"I see and hear a lot of talk," wrote "billj" at AllOutdoor in 2016, "about how a national gun registration and/or confiscation would be the trigger that would spark a second American Revolution, as patriots rise up to resist the jackbooted thugs who are going door-to-door taking away people's arms." The writer exhibited skepticism about the chances for such massive resistance, and I recommend his article to your attention: "The Democrats Will Never Confiscate Your Guns. Instead, You'll Hand them Over."

It's as if people have forgotten where we are in this country. In particular, many conservatives haven't put two and two together when it comes to the Central Government's vastly swollen police and national-security powers, which they seem as likely to cheer as condemn.

As the left-totalitarians never tire of reminding us, we're no longer living in the eighteenth century!

At any rate, what "billj" wrote reminds me of a "Stop and think" observation I wrote in February 2013 during another leftist uproar over citizens' right to defend themselves. Here it is:

Gunowners exposed! Not too long ago I saw another of those articles by a gunowner-rights guy confidently predicting mass civil disobedience in the face of the regime's renewed push to disarm the American people. Well, maybe. In the past I've advertised myself as a pessimist, but I'd really like you to take my cautionary response as nothing more than realism in action — as a sort of tactical reconnaissance.

I list below the possible sanctions against non-cooperating gunowners that I was able to come up with in five minutes. (As you'll see if you hit the link, I didn't actually come up with the first one.) How many gunowners would persist in their resistance if the Authorities:

required them (and their landlord or mortgage holder?) to buy expensive liability insurance;

barred them from taking various customary tax deductions and tax credits;

barred them from federal mortgage subsidies;

barred them from government student loans;

barred them from government small-business loans;

barred them from bidding on government contracts or working for a government contractor;

mobilized the family-regulation authorities to investigate and otherwise harass them, if the gunowner were a parent of minor children;

denied child custody, if the gunowner were a divorced or separated parent;

authorized the IRS and provincial tax authorities to levy fines on them, along the lines of what the Obamacare enactment has already mandated;

authorized the levying of fines in the form of deductions from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps, or the complete "sequestration" of benefits under those programs;

posed questions on the application for a drivers license, a business license, or vehicle registration about the extent of their cooperation, exposing non-cooperators to prosecution for fraud if they lied; or

seized their assets or just froze their bank and investment accounts?

Most of the above "incentives" would encounter challenges in the regime's court system and even in the various assemblies of lawfakers. Nevertheless, now is a good time for gunowners in particular to reflect on how grievously they have become — if I may yet again quote the title of Charlotte Twight's great book — dependent on D.C. [End of 2013 observation.]

[Nicholas Strakon]
 

Modine Herbey comments (April 6): I understand where "billj" is coming from when he writes of Democrats wanting to confiscate guns, but who could be surprised if some of the measures he and Strakon mention are imposed by a Republican regime?

Bill Bennett, drug-war "czar" for the first President Bush, now says he supports gunowners' rights. That's great, but let's see what our Wayback Machine can tell us. Actually, modern incuriosity and amnesia being as bad as they are, it's hard to find mention on the Net of Bennett's earlier iniquity, but Dave Kopel cited it in a piece he wrote in 2009 about the "czar" picked by President Obama:

Before the dark days of the Clinton administration, few federal government officials had done more to damage Second Amendment rights than William Bennett, the so-called "drug czar" under [Republican] President George H.W. Bush. In March 1989, Bennett set off a national panic by pushing the first Bush administration to ban the import of so-called "assault weapons."

Bennett claimed that "assault weapons" were the firearms of choice for violent drug dealers. The claim, of course, was nonsense. Police gun seizure data showed that the guns were rarely used in any type of crime. Yet Bennett's massive publicity stunt prohibited dozens of models of high-quality guns. And it set the stage for state-level bans on so-called "assault weapons," and, in the long run, for the 1994 Clinton gun ban.

Ah, yes, 1994. More Republican profiles in courage emerged: "Ford, Carter, Reagan Push for Gun Ban," by William J. Eaton, Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1994. Two Republican presidents there.

We've recently heard the current Republican president dismiss due process in respect to gunowners, but you may have missed this other stinking lump of repulsiveness, from last year: "Trump administration asks Supreme Court to reject 2nd Amendment claim by men who lost gun rights over nonviolent crimes," by David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2017.

See what I mean? (April 2018)


Curses! Outflanked again! According to the Washington Times, the recently passed $1.3 trillion spending bill preserved "the controversial EB-5 investor visa program, dubbed the 'golden visa,' which allows wealthy foreigners willing to invest a hefty chunk of change into an American business to get on a path to citizenship."

Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees, had been trying to force reforms on the program, but they said wealthy business interests outflanked them.

Now, just what does that mean?

Did those tricky wealthy business interests somehow meddle with the vote count?

Did they sneak in a palimpsest substitute for the actual bill?

Just how did they outwit these poor legislators? Is there something in the legislative process that permits "wealthy business interests" to rewrite bills? Do their votes count somehow? Did they trick the chairmen into being absent when the bill was being debated?

Inquiring minds (which category apparently does not include the newswriters) want to know. [Ronn Neff] (March 2018)


The big walkout. Nothing screams rebellion like government schools encouraging government students to demonstrate in favor of government restrictions on non-government gun ownership. [Tony Pivetta] (March 2018)


Only one sure way. We were told that the idea behind reducing the federal income-tax deduction for state income taxes was that it would marshal pressure on high-tax (blue) states to reduce their taxes. Conservatives from Larry Kudlow and Grover Norquist to Rush Limbaugh hailed this measure as ending "subsidies" to blue states from lower-tax (red) states.

How well is that working? Take a look at Elise Young's March 13 story at Bloomberg: "New Jersey's New Budget Aims to Raise Taxes on Almost Everything."

My famously pollyannish impulses seem to have gotten the better of me again: I would have thought that even conservatives had learned by now that there is only one sure way to get states to lower taxes:

Make them do it. The image of King John surrounded by armed barons comes to mind. [Ronn Neff] (March 2018)


Transparodistic, not from The Onion, etc., etc. Thanks to the Daily Mail, this grotesquerie out of Douglasville, Georgia, now resides in our brain: "Parents pull daughter, 7, out of school after she portrayed a racist character in a play for the class — where she was the only white student — and told a black peer 'Go home, you don't belong here!'" by Anneta Konstantinides, March 15, 2018.

These parents think it's a good idea to send their daughter to a school where she's one of a handful of white children. But to portray a racist in a play! — they draw the line there.

(a) It's a good thing no one has written a play about the life and films of Butterfly McQueen.

(b) Presumably the parents wouldn't mind if the kid was in a play in which she played Lizzie Borden.

[Ronn Neff]

Modine Herbey comments: Comrade Parents, please reconsider! White children are scarce and getting scarcer! We need them to play such roles! (March 2018)


Down with school prisons! Some very sharp analysis here by John W. Whitehead: "Say No to 'Hardening' the Schools with Zero Tolerance Policies and Gun-Toting Cops," LewRockwell.com, March 15, 2018.

The "hardening" proposals would just lead to more of what we've been seeing for decades: civilization receding and totalitarianism advancing — speeding and worsening the civilizational collapse.

More school cops would mean more bullying of kids. Bullying kids is far safer than fighting those who would kill kids.

The "zero tolerance" insanity is a perfect example of what the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny" — anarchy meaning chaos, in this case.

The entire government "education" system must be torn out, root and branch. That would put us on the road to real anarchy — meaning peace, justice, and natural order. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2018)


I'll never look at Halloween the same way again. Today, all good comrades, including the little comrades doing the school walkouts, are supposed to wear orange.

It transpires that orange is the color for protesting "gun violence." Did you know that? Today's the first I've heard of it, but so often, I'm just slow.

Come to find out, the orange thing has been leftist policy since 2015, according to this bit from CNN that I found whilst googling:

Orange was chosen to symbolize the value of human life and is worn as a signal that wearers do not want to be the next victim of gun violence, [an oddly named source] said. The idea comes from hunters, who wear the color to alert fellow hunters to their presence in densely wooded areas.
When I spot such things, I always ask, Wouldn't it be interesting to know who came up with that piece of agitprop? And even more interesting, to know how the idea-transmission machinery worked, following the original inspiration? Well! In the story quoted above, CNN actually offers some answers, with respect to the orange brainstorm: "Why people are #WearingOrange today," by Wyatt Massey, June 2, 2015.

Don't you wish liberty-minded folk had a transmission belt like that? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2018)


Freedom or ...? Get a load of this: "Poll on Diversity vs. Free Speech among College Students: 'Inclusivity' Is Better Than Freedom," by Steve Sailer, VDare, March 12, 2018.

I always seek the silver lining, as you know, so suffice it to say that I'm glad our adversaries have now formulated the dichotomy in a way that's so clear and explicit.

Another way of putting it: It's great that they've taken to wearing such bright colors. No camouflage for them. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2018)


How Minitrue phrases it for hoi polloi. When he was governor, Mike Pence resisted forcing Hoosier taxpayers to finance the resettlement of Syrian immigrants in Indiana. On March 2, the Fort Wayne CBS affiliate, WANE-TV, ran a brief report on a Central Government court's decision about that resistance. The newsreader said:

"... [A] federal judge says that Indiana must allow Syrian refugees to resettle in the state. Former Governor Mike Pence cited terrorism fears when he stopped state agencies from paying to help relocate Syrians to Indiana. The ACLU of Indiana sued, arguing that Pence's order illegally targeted Syrians based on their nationality, and that it violated the U.S. Constitution and federal law. The judge agreed." (My emphasis.)

Generally there's nothing worse than TV news, but as you'll see if you read the AP's story of March 1, its formulation of the issue isn't much better.

There was, of course, no state law or regulation preventing Syrians who were legally in the country from moving to Indiana. If a Syrian called up Allied Van Lines saying he wanted to move from Dayton to Muncie, the company was not required to inform the Indiana State Police.

Again we see that, for the totalitarians, failing to subsidize an activity is equivalent to banning it. It seems to parallel T.H. White's rule for the ant colony: "EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY." [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2018)


Flanked by happy fascists from the steel and aluminum industries, Mr. Thompson — oh, excuse me, Mr. Trump, on March 1 promised to impose protective tariffs on steel and aluminum imports into the land area claimed by the great crime organization in Washington, D.C.

From Politico:

President Donald Trump on Thursday ignited a possible trade war by announcing a decision to impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum to protect both industries from unfairly traded imports that the Commerce Department has determined pose a threat to national security.

"It'll be 25 percent for steel. It will be 10 percent for aluminum. It'll be for a long period of time," Trump said at a listening [sic] session with steel and aluminum industry executives at the White House. "We'll be signing it next week. And you'll have protection."

Seeing the televised event before reading the Politico piece, I wondered where Trump derived this particular authority to "rule by decree," in the style that Republicans screamed so loudly about when the Unicorn Prince exercised it. I suspected, though, that it was all "legal" (within the universe of government "law") and proceeded from yet another surrender by Congress of its constitutional prerogatives.

Right-o.

But Trump's authority was established long before the ruling class invented Obama and installed him in the Palace. From the article:

Trump ordered the Commerce Department to initiate investigations last April examining whether the imports posed a threat to national security. The probes were invoked under the rarely used Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Commerce released the findings of those investigations and its recommendations earlier in February, finding that imports of the metals did endanger national security.

"Trade Expansion Act" — that's very good, isn't it? And some people think fascists have no sense of humor.

Nowhere in the Politico article do I see any mention of the effect that higher steel and aluminum prices will have on Americans — except for those Americans at the Pentagon. And the message there is, Not to worry.

Bastiat, Bastiat.

During the TV event, Trump actually boasted about his earlier tariff on washing machines, raising the price of those items for ordinary Americans. It's a new frontier in populism, I guess, especially when you throw in his recent attacks on gunowners' rights and due process. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Modine Herbey comments. "Mr. Thompson" is good, but "Mr. McKinley" would be good, too. Or "Mr. Herbert Hoover." Along with some other ancient GOP names I could mention. I'm just sayin', this is some old-time Republican religion we got goin' here. (March 2018)
 

Further reading on the tariff power surrendered to our Mr. Thompsons, past and present: "Presidential Authority to Raise Tariffs," by Jean Heilman Grier, Perspectives on Trade, January 10, 2017.
 

"Officer safety," in spades. I have to say, I was already fed up with all the pompous nonsense about cops "putting their lives on the line," etc. After all, what about the lumberjacks, farmers, miners, fishermen, linemen, construction workers, and all the others that work at jobs much more dangerous? They put their lives on the line, too, so that we can live comfortably in the modern world, but they don't rate the same kind of regard, apparently.

Those guys don't get the enormous traffic-blocking funeral motorcades, with saluting firemen on the overpasses; the lugubrious candlelight "tributes"; the faked sadness on the face of newsreaders reporting on some uniformed thug who stumbled into the path of a bullet.

The thing is, after all that blather about "putting their lives on the line," when the time comes for cops to actually do it, as often as not it seems that they don't. During the Virginia Tech massacre, for instance, the cops waited outside for five minutes, giving the shooter time to take out more innocents before finally making himself safely dead.

The same thing happened in Florida on February 14. There was a "resource officer" — the educationist term for campus cop — on the scene, who conspicuously did nothing. And then three more cops showed up, and also did nothing. In fact, they didn't even surround the building to keep the perpetrator from getting away — which he did. They just cowered and listened to the screams of kids getting shot.

When I was young, I learned at some point that bullies were usually cowards: if you stood up to them, they usually backed down. And so it seems to be with the uniformed kind. Oh, it's good fun to have a uniform and a badge and a sidearm, and to use them to intimidate the taxpayers. You've got your "officer safety" training to justify shooting unarmed citizens first and asking questions later: "The officer perceived a credible threat when the 62-year-old grandmother reached for her purse. It was a justified shooting."

And, let's face it, most actual criminals are so pathetic they're not really much of a threat. In fact, if you want to beat up on them, chances are no one's going to believe them when they say they didn't resist. Or you can just steal their money and drugs, as the Los Angeles cops did in the Rampart scandal, or the Baltimore cops convicted just a few weeks ago. Or the Chicago cops just indicted. Or the Philadelphia cop recently indicted.

But every once in a while an actual threat to the citizenry comes along — the kind of threat against which you're actually supposed to put your life on the line, to save the lives of innocents. And what happens then, Mr. Tough Guy?

So I don't expect you to protect me or anything. Just, please don't gratuitously shoot me during a traffic stop, okay? And also, don't give us any more rubbish about "lives on the line." That's all I ask. [David T. Wright] (March 2018)


If the cops can't do it, no one can. Certain anti-gunowner folk are summoning the gall to, er, argue that since the deputy on duty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School failed to defend the unarmed people in the school, no one can be expected to undertake an armed defense against armed aggression. I just saw a long Facebook post detailing past instances of cop incompetence with firearms, seeking to undermine President Trump's notion about arming teachers, who surely would be more incompetent than the cops. Here's a piece in Deadline Hollywood that uses the deputy's inaction to claim that defense against aggression is futile. And here's Chris Cillizza's version of the same leftist tune, at CNN. (For Cillizza, "doesn't always" apparently has the same argumentative power as "never.")

The leftists' premise seems to be that since guns are BAD, only BAD people can succeed in using them. One implication might be that if cops are GOOD, then they might as well be disarmed. However, in most other contexts leftists seem to believe that cops are BAD, even though they are the left-totalitarian regime's first line of enforcement and defense. In fact, some variety of armed cops would have to carry out any gun confiscation and prohibition. The Party line is very confusing, as we might expect it to be, since it doesn't depend on actual thinking.

One may notice that, as usual, the leftists are ignoring the blizzard of examples of righteously armed people successfully defending themselves, their loved ones, and their property against attackers who were armed or physically stronger.

In any case, arming (and training) teachers isn't the only possibility for anti-Left people to consider. How about private professional security, dependent on operational success in order to survive in a competitive market? That very solution would prevail, no doubt, if school and state were separated.

The leftists' incompetent-cop argument makes as much sense as a claim that if Stalinist agriculture was a disaster, then free-market agriculture must be a disaster, too. And if Venezuelan supermarket shelves are empty, then American supermarket shelves must be empty, too — ooops! It ain't so. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2018)


The Russia mania. It's unlikely that Russia will go communist again, and it's just a shame. Our liberal conspiratorialists would quiet down immediately. Getting the neocons out of our face, though — that's a tougher proposition. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2018)


Quotation of the Day. In the New York Times, February 17: "This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be a school shooter. If this isn't a person who should have gotten someone's attention, I don't know who is. This was a multi-system failure." That's a quote from Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender, whose office is representing Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting last Wednesday at a Florida high school.

Hard to know what Finkelstein is getting at here, except maybe that his client is innocent because he should have been locked up before he murdered people. Or something like that.

Of course, we all know Nikolas Cruz is just a victim of the system and should get a disability pension, not jail time. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that his actions were a consequence of 1) racism, 2) prejudice against weirdos, 3) gender bias, or 4) economic inequality. Or all four. What the authorities need to do is identify which member of the establishment "triggered" such behavior in the first place. Most likely somebody in the White House. [Edward Morrison Morley] (February 2018)


A valentine for America: Forget all the politics about the portraits of Obama and the missus. And the anti-white hate speech of the president's artist. Just forget all that. One fact about the two portraits.

They are cheap-looking and cartoonishly ridiculous. On the other hand, America deserves nothing better. [Ronn Neff] (February 2018)

Further reading: "Affirmative-Action Portraits," by
Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, February 13, 2018.


Even libertarians don't get it: When we say we are against, say, rap "music," we do not mean we want the state to get involved in it one way or the other. What we mean is that we want the people to reject it and with their free decisions make it less ubiquitous. We don't want a rap culture, and we want our fellow citizens, with their own decisions, to protect the country from having one.

When we say we are against Third World immigration, open-borders libertarians think we favor government control of immigration. They seem to think that every "for" or "against" has to involve the state.

That is not what we think. We do not mean we want the state to get involved in it one way or the other. What we mean is that we want the people to reject it and with their free decisions make it less ubiquitous. We don't want a Third World culture, and we want our fellow citizens, with their own decisions, to protect the country from having one. [Ronn Neff] (February 2018)


2017 archive.

Published in 2018 by WTM Enterprises.