Yuri Bezmenov and warnings unheeded

 Here's a must-watch. Soviet KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov lecturing around 1984. He sounds like he was watching us through a time machine, and he tells the people then how they can prevent us from getting to where we are.

Understanding the Modern Political Scenario

At least every minute in the video there is an insight that makes me want to pound my head on the desk because it's 40 years too late, but here's one I thought was particularly apropos about reversing the process of demoralization:

At that point, at the point of destabilization, also this could be reversed, again, easier than this [crisis stage]. No CIA involvement at this point. You know what it takes here? Restriction of some liberties for small groups which are self-declared enemies of the society. Simple as that.

'Oh, no,' the media and liberals will tell you. 'This is against the American Constitution. How can we by force deny the civil rights to criminals?' for example. 'Not good!' So, okay, you allow the criminals to have civil rights. Go on, bring the country to the crisis. This is the bloodless way to do it. Curb the rights. I'm not to put them in prison. No, no, I'm not talking about putting all the gays from San Francisco into the concentration camp. Do not allow them to take political force. Do not elect them to the seats of power, whether it is municipality level, state level, federal level. It has to be bitten in the heads of American voters: a person like that in the seats of power is an enemy. Do not be afraid of this word. It is an enemy. If he is not an enemy here [points to chart of subversion stages on board, of screen], he will be here [points to another spot on off-screen board]. Later on, he will be shot, of course [call back to earlier point in the talk where he says the early destabilization agents are always eliminated after their purpose is fulfilled]. But at this point he is an enemy.

You are doing him a great service by denying him a right to capitalize on his own crazy ideas and become a powerful man, a man who uses the seat of power.

What did I say wrong?

I commented on a Six Chix comic this morning.

Here's my comment. As you can see, it was removed:

I guess only White people aren't allowed to culturally appropriate. I object to her putting her words in the mouth of what is obviously a White rural man (note the trucker hat). If she actually knew any White rural men, she'd probably find out that our views of big box stores are nuanced, but that we also don't think dislike of something equals a right to burn down other peoples' property and businesses.

Xunise has been very upset because last week, some newspapers refused to run her comment, and one even dropped the Six Chix strip:

https://www.cbr.com/six-chix-pro-mask-pro-blm-comic-strip-pulled-from-newspapers/

Xunise doesn't like it very much when she is silenced and seems to think it is because she is black.

"Please stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people who silence Black voices."

But I guess silencing my White voice is OK. 

Lost ground

All my rentals are in suburban communities that have been destroyed by diversity. One particular that I was sad to see go was this little neighborhood between Morse and Dublin-Granville Rd. in Columbus. It is known as the Forest Park neighborhood and it was designed as a suburb with those winding roads and cul de sacs to suppress fast through traffic. At the center is a huge traffic circle and in the middle of the circle is a shopping center that was intended to be the community center. Grocery store, bowling alley, various other shops.

It managed to maintain for a good long while. The first killer was the fact that it is within Columbus Public Schools. As the schools went Black and violent, people with options didn’t want to live within the district, but there were still Catholic schools and a certain amount of people willing to brave the diversity. But the Catholic schools have become Blacker, too, and most of the charter schools in the area are majority Black.

Then a few years ago, they started dumping Somalis in the area. It destroyed the neighborhood. Untended garbage-filled yards, filth.

The North Linden area a little ways south was the same thing, but 20 years earlier, destroyed by Section 8. There were projects nearby, which a lot of people didn’t want to live too close to, and also Columbus public schools, but there were a decent amount of working-class Whites who figured that a nice 3-4 bedroom house for $40-$60k was worth the effort (I was one of them back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. WE homeschooled, so didn’t care about the schools). Back in those days Columbus Alternative High School was still a good place and it was smack in the middle of North Linden.

But once they shut down the projects and started offering section 8 vouchers, the ghetto streamed into North Linden.

The area south of Hudson Ave was always (at least, since Blacks started moving in in the 60s-70s) pretty bad, but the dysfunction has moved many blocks north. We only own one rental south of Hudson and we simply can’t rent it to White people — it’s not safe for them. North of Hudson, the farther north you go the nicer the neighborhood gets, but the cancer is still spreading. With the Somali invasion immediately north, it’s just sad what has happened.

Northland Mall used to be at the Northern border of North Linden about 20 years ago, but even then the rot was setting in. I had a friend from work who was cornered by a Black gang at the mall and savagely beaten: He was the most stereotypically mild, gentle GoodWhite you’ve ever met.

What killed the mall was the apartments known as “Uzi Alley” immediately south of the mall.

The mall was shut down not long afterward, then torn down. The area stood empty for years, but now it is government buildings and has had a bit of a renaissance with a Menards and some strip malls, but the Somalis and Blacks make it hard to keep anything nice. One of my daughters lives in the area and will no longer go the Kroger there, because it is so full of Somalis who leave everything dirty and are always starting trouble.

You have to fight for every step. The problem isn’t “suburbs” or any way people like to live. The problem is Whites being driven out by Blacks and other minorities.

The Long Game

So, I’m laying awake this morning thinking about how unbelievable all this mass hysteria is, when the thought occurred to me, “Hey, it is unbelievable! Literally unbelievable.” As in, not to be believed. That’s not to say that what is happening isn’t happening, it clearly is. But the idea that this is a spontaneous uprising, that a Black felon dying during an arrest in Minneapolis actually sparked riots in places like Copenhagen and Berlin … that’s pretty far-fetched.

Now, we talk about “astroturf” and George Soros-funded organizations a lot, but it doesn’t take much digging to start uncovering companies like Crowds on Demand ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowds_on_Demand ), founded by Adam Swart.

From the Wiki, it’s easy to find out more of what’s going on by adhering to the principle “SJWs always project.” You look at what the SJWs are complaining about, then dig into the opposite. For example, John Oliver did an episode about astroturfing. Of course, he does it from the perspective of the left, that this is a thing that evil corporations do. He spends the entire episode making the case that astroturfing companies exist and are active all over, but then turns around and says “The very existence of groups like Crowds on Demand means that something authentic can now be tainted. In fact, conspiracy boards now regularly and wrongly cite Crowds on Demand as providing everything from paid protestors for Charlottesville to crisis actors for the Las Vegas shooting, and that is hugely dangerous!”

See what he’s doing there? When it’s the evil corporate right astroturfing, believe it, but left-wing astroturfers, no way, those are totes legit. Of course he ties the right-wing accusations into something like the Las Vegas shooting to try to emotionally influence his viewers.

He implies a lot about Rick Berman, “Dr. Evil” and the Center For Consumer Freedom, but when it comes to the meat of his accusations, he makes a point of saying he’s not allowed to legally express them, “I can’t say. I legally can’t say. I want to. I badly want to, but I’ve been explicitly told I can’t.” Well, why not? If he had actually done some real journalism and had evidence to back up what he was saying, of course he could say. Investigative journalism is a thing, he works for a very wealthy corporation and truth is a defense against libel and slander. By saying 'I can’t say,' what he’s really saying is that his claims are tendentious, and he can’t back them up. It’s funny that a sidebar to the article about the astroturfing episode is an article “Here’s Why it’s a Bad Idea to Sue John Oliver”. Yes, Oliver is just a brave truth-teller being silenced by The Man for telling the truth about Rick Berman.

So, since the marching orders for the Left are “Hate Rick Berman,” I decided to check out who hates Rick Berman and the Center for Consumer Freedom, now the Center for Organizational Research and Education. I noted that the wiki page for this organization is careful to detail concerns about its corporate funding. A lot of the subtext in Oliver’s show and a lot of left wing criticism of astroturfing is that if a corporation funds it, they must be lying, which is, of course, not self-evident. They simply want you to incorporate that assumption into your thinking.

Well, who hates CORE/CCF? Why, the CDC, CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest), MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), PETA, PCRM (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine). Barring the CDC, which itself is a heavily politicized agency, these are all leftist groups and all arguably astroturfed.

CSPI particularly stuck out at me, as it is famous for its dishonest, astroturfed campaigns. Of course, its wiki page wants us to believe that it is not astroturfed at all, that its $20 million/year operating budget comes primarily from 900,000 subscriptions to its Nutrition Action Healthletter. For comparison, that’s significantly larger than the circulations of the New York Times or the Washington Post. It’s bigger than the print circulation of USA Today. It’s about half the circulation of Time Magazine, one of the biggest magazines in the world. And what do we know about Time Magazine? It’s in near financial ruin. It has changed hands several times over the past several years because it’s a dying business with declining readership. The subscription magazine business model is not a healthy one. Yet we’re to believe that this crappy newsletter has 900,000 reliable subscribers and expenses so low that it manages to fund most of the rest of the organization’s operations. I smell plastic grass. Tell me another story.

So, yes, astroturfing is big business, especially on the left (We know especially on the left, because it is the left complaining about it through John Oliver. See “SJWs always project”).

I believe the current BLM/Antifa protests are a heavily astroturfed psyop. Most of the protestors out there are legit, but that’s because it only takes a handful of astroturfers to play off the predictable responses of credulous leftist protestors. The fact that BLM is just a front group isn’t even arguable. BLM contributions go directly to the Democratic Party. I also think the entire thing has been planned out way beyond the seemingly chaotic moment, and is taking into account the response of the average normal citizen on the center to right.

First we have the response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, which was a truly fortuitous virus in that it is primarily deadly to the old – the most conservative demographic. It also spreads relatively easily, but is almost no danger to the youngest, most radical, credulous, left-leaning portion of the population. They ginned up fears of this virus and pushed to see how much totalitarian control they can exhibit over the world population (Spoiler: near total). If the virus had been treated normally, with normal moderate precautions, it would have really represented no particular threat to the world economy. Most of the harm was done by the response to the virus.

They waited for people who still care about civil liberties to start acting out, then they demonized them: crazy, anti-Semitic, racist, anti-science nuts who are risking everyone’s lives by gathering in crowds and spreading the virus!

Then the George Floyd protests. A total flip of the script. The mainstream right is supposed to react exactly as it has: “See what hypocrites they are! Protests on the right were crazy, but when these BLM and Antifa goons protest, it’s fine!” The people organizing the protests make sure they’re as violent and unreasonable as possible. Lots of rioting and looting. And that’s not hard, because they’ve been nurturing Black and left-wing Anti-Americanism for decades.

All the BLM demands, all the ostentatious kneeling and submission to Blacks, yeah, that’s going to be with us a long time, but it’s not really the endgame. Neither is the defunding/abolition of cops. Anyone with a brain knows that is never going to happen. Oh, they will allow some defunding, all right, but just enough to cause enough disorder to scare normie back into line.

What’s coming is, they let the normies do their work for them. Normie is going to get increasingly shocked by all the apparent insanity. They still haven’t recovered from being terrified about COVID-19. First the crazies on the right (never mind that they were peaceful), then the crazies on the left! Rising crime rates over the summer or the next year or two will cement the call: “What we need around here is just some freaking order!”

“Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch, Br’er Normie!” And order is just what the authoritarian left is waiting in the wings to provide. Of course the left can stop the riots – they started them. Of course they can refund the cops -- they defunded them! And those civil liberties, clearly they were getting out of control. We need to dial back those crazy freedoms because, darn it, they were just being misused by both the left and the right! We want everyone to be safe. We want everyone to get along. We need to dial back the “racism” and “hatred.” We need to make sure that the stuff people say online is more “responsible.” And thank goodness Google, Twitter and Facebook are there to help!

You want a picture of the future? Imagine a Trust and Safety Council stomping on dissident speech, forever.

ETA: When I talk about the mainstream right acting exactly as planned, this is exactly the sort of thing I am talking about. What is going on in the video discussed in the post is absolutely not going to convince normie that gun control is a bad idea!

The Revolutionary Phenotype

I just bought The Revolutionary Phenotype on Kindle and I've been browsing through it. I'm frankly a little disappointed. It was exactly what I expected. Another Kiplingesque "Just So Story." The author says "By the end of this book we will have made a definitive case that each of the phenotypic revolutions listed above did occur." Well, no. Definitive, as in conclusive, as in no further discussion needs to be had? No. The author has told a story, that's all. It's a plausible story that doesn't contradict any known physical laws, like all the best science fiction. But it remains just a story. It hasn't been tested, hasn't been subject to falsification. I am unbearably tired of these attempts to tell a story regarding evolution and call it conclusive.

I find it very significant that the author refers to the "interests" of RNA molecules. Only conscious actors have interests. Self-replicating molecules have no interests. They don't "want" to keep replicating. They don't "want" anything. Throughout the book, he uses the language of agency. It's very anthropomorphic the way he talks about tricksters and goals and relative importance of different tasks to these non-thinking entities that have no internal notion of their own survival.

He refers to "the rules of evolution": "If Quantum Darwinism is correct, then a replicator was subject to the rules of evolution long before the appearance of life on Earth..."

He defines the first principles of evolution:

1. Some entities make almost exact copies of themselves (replicators);
2. These entities do other things (phenotypic machines).

And his brief definition of the theory of natural selection:

"Across generations replicators occur within restricted restricted environments and produce imperfect copies of themselves. Because the imperfect copies vary across the population, each set of replicators produces phenotypic machines that differ across the population as well. The replicators able to create machines that favor their own replication naturally increase in number. The replicators that produce less efficient machines become less numerous. Accordingly across generations, replicators are served by machines that are increasingly well-suited to favor their copying."

But this all falls back to the fundamental tautology of natural selection. The devil is in the value judgments: "favor" and "less efficient." Simple self-replicating molecules don't "favor" anything and efficiency can only be predicted after the fact -- what survived, survived. RNA doesn't intelligently adapt to changing conditions. It doesn't have "interests."

It's simply a more sophisticated sounding version of the turtle story: "My opponent's reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, 'On a tortoise.' But on what does the tortoise stand? "On another tortoise." With Mr. Barker, too, there are tortoises all the way down." -- Joseph Frederick Berg

Where did DNA come from? RNA! Where did RNA come from? Some previous self-replicating molecule! And where did it come from? It's replicators all the way down!

It seems to me that if you get down to a simple enough replicator, you would get to one so simple that it was incapable of making copying errors and still having a functional machine. Each step he describes represents a statistical anomaly that is incredibly unlikely -- "not enough atoms and time in the universe" levels of unlikely, but he expects us to believe this happens over and over and over with striking and necessarily cascading frequency as the self-replicators grow more complex, yet he gives no concrete, testable examples of how this occurs or what the rate is.

"One day [me: it even opens like a Kipling Just So Story], by pure chance, a single RNA molecule developed a small mutation. This mutation caused the RNA molecule to produce a new type of phenotypic machine, one that resembled RNA, but with an additional smattering of oxygen and hydrogen atoms.

"That machine was DNA. 

"Presumably, at some point, the presence of DNA somehow advantaged the RNA replicators that produced it..."

When your entire book comes down to a "presumably" and a "somehow" you're not making a "definitive" case for anything.

The rest is just the same "time and random mutation" claptrap we've been hearing about for more than a century:

"Simply put, the replicators able to create good phenotypic machines replace other replicators by outnumbering them. If you extrapolate this principle over millions and billions of generations you can understand why a bacteria could progressively evolve into a bird."

Well, no, I don't understand that. Birds don't outnumber bacteria. They don't outcompete bacteria. They are food for bacteria. They are not as successful as bacteria at surviving or thriving in any given environment on Earth. All they are is more complex, and nothing the author discusses posits complexity as a good in itself. Complexity just means more points of failure. Birds are far more fragile, more sensitive to changing environmental conditions than bacteria.

I've only lightly skimmed the "Answers" section of the book, but at first pass, the entire section with all its talk of "trickster printers" appears to be just baseless, non-technical, blue sky theorizing about stuff that, when you strip away all the author's language, doesn't really solve or explain anything.

The "Predictions" section isn't even worthy of discussion.

The New Plame Affair

Is Philip Giraldi wrong?

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars/

This is what "free speech" looks like on Disqus discussion groups

Disqus hosts its own internal discussion groups. I have rarely been able to post in any of them without getting immediately banned from the group. So I suppose this actually rates as a relatively positive experience, because I wasn't banned and some of my posts are (for now) still up.

Disqus groups are relentlessly leftist, and they can absolutely not tolerate BadThink.


In the News Views group, this article was posted:





So I posted the following and got a very quick reply, to which I courteously responded:




In very little time, I was deleted:

I posted a followup. I was actually pretty sure this was going to get deleted. Imagine my surprise:




But just look at that. The conversation is unreadable. It wasn't even allowed to proceed for even a few minutes before being shut down by a moderator. I don't mind at all whatever "terrible" thing the other person may have said. The Disqus moderators, in my experience, are terrified of actual free speech and open discourse. And if they shut the other person down for rude speech, or whatever, then they also shut down my speech by making any discourse impossible.

I'm really beginning to hate Disqus. At least they don't get to pick the moderators for independent sites.

ETA: Gotta capture this one, in case it doesn't make it!

ETAA: In the same vein, had a post at The Mary Sue deleted. The accompanying article was literally just repetition of "TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. spliced with emotionalistic tweets supporting trans people.

Leftists simply cannot abide any sort of disagreement. How is one supposed to respect their positions when they are unable to cogently argue them, and simply shut down any disagreement?

Richard Spencer Discussion

For discussion of alt-right speaker Richard Spencer.

ETA: It's now 7/27/2017. I posted this way back on 5/30 to offer a forum for some fellow on another site who said he had all sorts of information proving what a horrible racist Richard Spencer is. He asked to email it to me, but I don't hand out my email, so I put this post up and told him to post it here as a comment. Crickets. Guess that information was pretty darn persuasive, huh?

Charlie Hebdo Won't Be The End Of This: Bring It

ETA this quotation from Ross Douthat: "If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said." 


This is the face of evil.

 

The workers of Charlie Hebdo will not die in vain.

Open Letter to Sony: Letting the bad guys win

Sent to: press@spe.sony.com

Letting the bad guys win

Way to show your cowardice, Sony. Pulling The Interview tells North Korea and the other murderous thugs of the world that threats and DDoS attacks are an effective tactic to shut up voices they don't want heard. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

You should have opened that picture even if you were left with just one screen in the country. You should have rented the biggest stadium you could afford, and had the CEO make a speech about freedom before the showing.

But no, you rolled over like kicked dogs. I'm ashamed on your behalf.

No Mao Stalin, Obama

From the history books: "Then, for his next executive order, then-President Obama used his pardon power and prosecutorial discretion to refrain from arresting people who murdered legislators, judges and journalists who stood in the way of his agenda. This came to be known, in a termed coined by President Obama's long-time ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as 'The Flexibility Period.' Research estimates the death toll during this period, to violence and starvation, at 20-30 million...."

Banned from NR

Well, this is a sad turn of events. I have been a paying subscriber to National Review Digital for many years.

Today, it appears I have been banned from commenting at NRO.

I can only assume it was because of a recent comment thread where I defended a poster whose opinions on eugenics were unpopular. I didn't even agree with the fellows arguments, but I felt that he was presenting his case rationally and respectfully, and deserved more thoughtful reasoned response than all the emotionalistic outcries of "Nazi" and "Eugenics is evil," because he clearly raised some uncomfortable, factual points, that people were not effectively addressing.

I've gone through my Disqus feed and looked over the banned posts, and I cannot find anything that I would be embarrassed to repeat to my mother or children. This is a very disappointing turn of events.

Buckley's NR was supposed to uphold the conservative ideals as espoused by our nations founders, including the ideal that opposing voices have a right to be heard.

Here are some of the banned posts, in reverse chronological order:

"The public is smarter than he and other Obamacare supporters give it credit for."

I don't know if I believe that. The public is pretty dumb. But that should be beside the point. The fact that individuals make poor choices is not sufficient justification to take those choices away from them. People have a right be autonomous, to direct their own lives. Implicitly, that includes the right to direct their own lives badly.

I think this is important to confront, because if your only justification for self-determination is that people are smart enough to make the decisions, then every occasion when they choose wrongly, as people inevitably will (in someone's opinion), is a justification to to take self-determination away.

The founders did not write "...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, but only unalienable as long as they make good choices when they're exercising those rights."

...

I don't include crimes against others, like murder, and I think abortion is murder. Criminal and civil justice is one of the legitimate spheres of government, in my opinion

...

So if it were possible through genetic testing and manipulation to identify and prevent or cure a serious genetic disease such as hemophilia en utero or at time of conception, you'd be opposed to using it? "Not being hemophiliac" is definitely a trait parents find desirable in their children.

...

Eugenics is also already happening quietly, steadily, on an individual level, and it's going to happen more and more as technology becomes more advanced. In the U.S., mothers regularly abort babies that test positive for Downs Syndrome. That's eugenics. In many countries, sex-selective abortions are common. As there are tests for more and more fetal traits, there will be parents who take advantage of that knowledge. It will be primarily the parents who are affluent enough to afford and care about such testing, at first. Gattica come to life. Or Brave New World, with the classes further self-segregating, as Murray has documented in Coming Apart.

Government policy will play catch-up to the realities on the ground, as it almost always does.

...

I'm willing to bet there are plenty of fans of Idiocracy among your detractors. But perhaps they've never really thought through how they'd avoid it becoming prophetic.

Someone said something along the lines that smart, educated women producing one designer baby at age 40, while the unemployed single mom in the Section 8 housing a couple neighborhoods over has eight kids by eight different fathers, is a recipe for societal disaster.

...

I'm honestly a little boggled that your point is so hard for them to understand. The almost willful barriers to comprehension surpass even my expectations of unwillingness to touch the third rail.

...

We didn’t know that he was a terrorist. This image is in popular use in Turkish memes on the Internet,

One of the most infamous Muslim terrorists in the world, the image is popular with Turks on the internet ... and nobody knew who he was. Riiiiiight.

Kid, I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night.

...

Mr. "Thrill Up My Leg" should just quietly resign and consign himself to a hermitage for his massive failure as a journalist. If I was a less charitable person, I'd suggest he literally fall on his sword.

...

Pretty much only the lawyers who have to appear in front of the regularly. So I generally refrain from voting unless I have some clue (like an endorsement from Buckeye Fireams Association, for example).

...

“I wore fishnets and a little black dress to vote, then walked around with a spring in my slinky step. It lasted for days. I can summon it when I’m blue. It’s more effective than exercise or ecstasy or cheesecake . . . ”

Ugh. Dunham is about as slinky as Play-Doh.

...

I must be the only one in the word that finds 2001 tedious and overrated.

...

The headline of this NYT article from September is looking mighty prophetic now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...

"Lena Dunham Is Not Done Confessing"

...

I have. And worse.

But it seems to me that's a cop-out, along the lines of women who say you can't discuss abortion if you're not a woman.

I reserve the right to comment regardless of my personal history. Your tone was flippant, and, having extensive experience with the gruesome realities of death, I think a lot more people could do with having to participate and experience the necessary ugliness and finality of death.

...

I think it's a mistake to treat all suicides as if they are the same. Brittany Maynard's case -- facing an unavoidable death -- is dramatically different than an otherwise healthy teen committing suicide due to depression, or a father killing himself and leaving his children fatherless because he lost his job.

...

Indeed. I switched primary care physicians recently, and when I called up the office of the new physician to enquire about them taking me on, nearly the very first thing out of their mouths was "We don't write prescriptions for painkillers." I hadn't asked.

The problem with government is that it becomes such a busybody in one area that it feels like it needs rules for every area.

If you could just buy pentobarbitol over the counter or behind the counter, as I do with many drugs for use on my ranch, then the government wouldn't have to have rules about what I used it for (apart from murder, of course). I don't do drugs, but that's why I'm one of those wretched drug-legalization libertarians. Not because I want a license to smoke pot, but because I think people deserve to be the ones to make their own decisions about their own lives without nanny government questioning their decisions all the time. Even if that means people make horrible decisions.

...

"...leaving a mess for my friend and others to clean up. I even got to
help. Needless to say, they diminished the value of their home."

How awful. Not a diminished home value?! And someone had to get their hands dirty? Unforgivable!

...

Ain't that the truth. I've got Section 8 tenants in my rental properties and guys who do labor for me driving around in better cars/trucks than me, but living hand to mouth. Who am I to question their priorities, though.

...

Why shouldn't the shoe shiner make $100k? Who decided that a librarian is more valuable than a shoe shiner? The correct answer should be "the market," but if there's a shoe shiner out there pulling down $100k, more power to him. Your labor's worth what you can get for it.

...

Classic confusion of correlation with causation.

...

Of course, they don't care whether the kids are capable of understanding. In fact, it's a lot easier to indoctrinate them when they can't fully cognitively process the information, It just becomes the kids' baseline for "how things are."

Their tactics make perfect sense when you understand their goals.

...

"Do they punish two kids for an entirely legal photograph that they took
in their home, and that caused no trouble to anybody? Or do they stay
the hell away from the issue?"

That's easy. They punish. Because their goal is to terrorize those who hold incorrect thoughts.

...

Well, they're white, anyway. I wonder when Jews are finally going to wake up and realize that the Democratic Party is not their friend in the long run.

...

Public institutions today are so soaked in relativism, they don't believe there is such a thing as an unreasonable criticism -- all cultures and viewpoints are equally valuable, of course. Unless, oddly, your viewpoint is Christian, conservative and/or pro-life. Then you're a right-wing nut-job and your opinions are out-of-bounds, if not hate speech.

...

You just want to cry that we've come to this. There are banana republics that would be too embarrassed to have such an obviously insecure, fraud-friendly voting system. And, since you can't vote them out, what alternative are you left with, besides violence?

...

I'm going to stop now. It just keeps going back. There are some odd incidents of posts fro about a week ago that haven't been removed, but I'm assuming that there's some little bot working away, scrubbing everything I've ever posted at National Review, making it like I never existed and that I was some out-of-bounds raging troll. The posts above aren't exceptions, there's no hidden posts where I rant outrageously and incoherently or call people names.

It's despicable.

Fun Fact: According To OSU, It Is Illegal To Have Sex With A Physically Disabled Person

I swear I'm not making this up. From OSU's own student conduct web site:

By law, a person cannot give consent, even when he or she might verbally say so, when:

• The person is so intoxicated or unconscious due to alcohol or drugs
• The person is physically or mentally disabled
• The person was coerced due to force, threat of force, or deception or when the person was beaten, threatened, isolated, or intimidated.

To emphasize: "By law, a person cannot give consent, even when he or she might verbally say so, when the person is physically or mentally disabled."

So, Ohio State is purporting that, by law, if you are physically disabled -- in a wheel chair, blind, missing a limb, have cerebral palsy or MS, or any other physical condition that qualifies you as physically disabled -- you are unable to consent to sex, even if you verbally say so.

Man, it must really suck being a disabled person at OSU. No sex for you!

Or, you have a free license to accuse anyone who has sex with you of sexual assault. Even if you enthusiastically said yes, in front of witnesses, because, hey, you're physically disabled and thus not responsible for your own decisions.

I dunno, if I were a physically disabled person, I might find that a wee bit insulting. Unless I was evil.

In saner times, Occam's Razor would lead me to believe that OSU's interpretation of the law is incorrect, but we live in times when schoolchildren are suspended for chewing their poptarts into pistol shapes and 5-year-old girls who point crayons and say "pew, pew" are forced to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves or anyone else, so sane thought processes can't really be applied to official policy anymore.

Thus, the only safe advice: OSU students, do not get it on with that hot physically disabled guy/girl in your Intro to Communications class!

Mainstream Islam Is Violent Islam

A reminder from Andrew McCarthy.

Islamic State terrorists have infamously decapitated three of their prisoners in recent weeks. That is five fewer than the Saudi government decapitated in August alone. Indeed, it is three fewer beheadings than were carried out in September by the Free Syrian Army — the “moderate Islamists” that congressional Republicans have now joined Obama Democrats in supporting with arms and training underwritten by American taxpayer dollars.

All Islam is the enemy of freedom and civilization.

Charity For The Elite

New York Times columnist David Brooks is astoundingly out-of-touch with the real world. In his New York Times column, Startling Adult Friendships, Brooks fantasizes on the theme of "What if you had $500 million to give away?"

Sadly, the best thing Brooks can come up with is "friendship retreats."

So I envision a string of adult camps or retreat centers (my oldest friendships were formed at summer camp, so I think in those terms). Groups of 20 or 30 would be brought together from all social and demographic groups, and secluded for two weeks. They’d prepare and clean up all their meals together, and eating the meals would go on for a while. In the morning, they would read about and discuss big topics. In the afternoons, they’d play sports, take hikes and build something complicated together. At night, there’d be a bar and music.

I think you have to be an academic or elite New Yorker not to realize that the only type of people who are interested in, or who have time to attend two-week "friendship retreats" are people who already have a lot of free time and who are already inclined to be interested in that sort of touchy-feely endeavor. Who has time to spend two weeks away from their regular life, even all-expenses paid? In other words, this will attract elites, the wealthy, or the Occupy Wall Street types (over-educated, under-employed).

So, basically, Brooks thinks the best way to change the world with a big bag of money is touchy-feely vacations for people just like him. Yeah, sounds like something a New York Times writer would come up with.

Or, you could look at it from the darker side, "groups of 20 or 30 would be brought together from all social and demographic groups." I love the term "would be brought together." People use the passive voice in writing when they are trying to avoid naming the actor, or the method of the action. How would people of "all social and demographic groups" be brought together? Because, let me tell you, my social and demographic group would rather gnaw its own leg off than have to spend two weeks at a David Brooks-sponsored friendship camp.

Of course, there are precedents. Socialists and Communists around the world have been very consistent in finding means of shipping people off to camps "for their own good," whether they want to go or not. Now, I'm not suggesting that Brooks wants to ship us all away to re-education camps against our will, I'm just using hyperbole to suggest that Brooks, like those totalitarians, thinks he knows what's best for us, and hasn't really thought it through far enough to realize that the very people he probably thinks need the camps most want nothing to do with him.

This is the sort of fuzzy-headed thinking the left is famous for. Yes, I know Brooks is ostensibly a "conservative" or "moderate" columnist at the New York Times, but, seriously, that's like being the biggest Libertarian on the Politburo.

Inevitably, such an idea would be an utter failure. In a free country, it just dies away and becomes joke fodder, like Air America. In a communist country, it becomes official government policy and turns into the Gulag.

These Sorts Of Conversatons Are Fine Until Someone Disagrees With You

Over on the blog where a fellow has decided I'm the worst person in the world, my condemner has been flirting with a discussion of Islam and ISIS because one of the cartoonists who frequents that site indicated on his Facebook page (sorry, no link, I don't do Facebook), that Islam is not a religion of peace.

Political discussions are against the site's rules, but my accuser apparently really wants to have the discussion. He says: "Listen, as Laura said, if it even qualifies as political (which I don’t think it does, since we are not talking about political policy here but rather one person’s perception of other people for reasons which I, personally, think are stupid–and calling comic strip creators stupid for stuff they’ve said on the internet is absolutely not against the rules here, considering we do it to guys like Batiuk and McEldowney all the time) it’s still far, far from the most politically-charged issue that’s been discussed here. It isn’t even the first time ISIS has been brought up. World events do not necessarily equal politics."

I think we can all infer, based on my accuser's past statements, that if I did participate and mount a formidable defense of the cartoonist's statement, which would be easy, it would immediately, in his opinion, cease to be a worthwhile conversation.

In any case, the violent nature of Islam has to be one of the top five most loaded political topics on the planet right now, so I'm going to do all the other readers a favor and not participate there.

My accuser is the kind of person who can watch the literal daily reports of Muslim atrocities over decades; see that every Muslim-dominated nation on earth is one that denies basic rights and freedoms -- even the best of them (Malaysia) are incredibly restrictive of religious freedom, but most are violent, misogynist hellholes; read Islam's scriptural exhortations to military domination, subjugation and murder of non-believers; see its blessings on violence against women and children by mainstream Islamic clerics and governments, and still say "Islam is a religion of peace, and, oh, Crusades, and some crazy Christians bombed abortion clinics back in the day, so Christianity is just as bad." It's like comparing a lone gnat on your apple to a plague of locusts.

But, religion of peace aside, what really annoys me is that I know the guy would just go nuts if I said what I think on the site, and I, the horrible, bad person, am the one who has to be the adult and not take his bait, for the sake of the innocent readers of the site.

Abolition Of The First Amendment, Redux

A few months ago, I made a short post, "Democrats Propose Amendment To Gut Free Speech."

Since almost nobody actually reads this blog, it was a rather monumental occurrence for someone to actually comment. The comment, was, sadly, the sloganeering soundbite "Uh huh; over in the real world, money is not free speech."

This is so disappointing. Not only because it's obviously false, but because the poster (who I have encountered elsewhere) clearly considers himself an intelligent, enlightened, right-thinking liberal.

Once upon a time, free speech was a liberal no-brainer. You were for it:

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" -- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire

But this silly "money is not speech" meme seems to have substituted for actual thought in an alarmingly large segment of the portion of the population that considers itself liberal.

I noticed today that noted right-wing hate group, the ACLU, agrees with me.

The ACLU drafted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee strongly opposing the Udall Amendment, for all the reasons that are absurdly obvious to anyone who has read the amendment and given it the slightest thought.

Of course money is speech. It takes money to reach people with your speech. The bill would allow complete regulation not only of campaign contributions, but of all funds spent in support of or opposition to candidates.

The ACLU letter goes into great detail. I encourage you to follow the link.

The grant of power to infringe speech is draconian and vast. The ACLU lists some obvious examples:

To give just a few hypotheticals of what would be possible in a world where the Udall proposal is the 28th Amendment:

• Congress would be allowed to restrict the publication of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming memoir “Hard Choices” were she to run for office;
• Congress could criminalize a blog on the Huffington Post by Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, that accuses Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) of being a “climate change denier”;
• Congress could regulate this website by reform group Public Citizen, which urges voters to contact their members of Congress in support of a constitutional amendment addressing Citizens United and the recent McCutcheon case, under the theory that it is, in effect, a sham issue communication in favor of the Democratic Party; 
• A state election agency, run by a corrupt patronage appointee, could use state law to limit speech by anti-corruption groups supporting reform; 
• A local sheriff running for reelection and facing vociferous public criticism for draconian immigration policies and prisoner abuse could use state campaign finance laws to harass and prosecute his own detractors; 
• A district attorney running for reelection could selectively prosecute political opponents using state campaign finance restrictions; and
• Congress could pass a law regulating this letter for noting that all 41 sponsors of this amendment, which the ACLU opposes, are Democrats (or independents who caucus with Democrats).

Such examples are not only plausible, they are endless.

A Survival Manual

Today I draw your attention to Richard Fernandez, Belmont Club at PJ Media, The First Horseman

From the article:

We often forget that the sacred texts of mankind began as practical documents.  They were checklists. And we may well rediscover this fact before the end. One can imagine the last two postmoderns crawling towards each other in the ruins of a once great city to die, and while waiting to expire engage in conversation to pass the time.

“Waldo,” the first said, “do you remember that tablet displayed in front of the Texas Statehouse. You know, back when there was a Texas?”
“Yeah, didn’t it have a whole bunch of stuff scrawled on it? Tell me again what it said,” replied the other.
“Waldo, it said, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ And ‘thou shalt not lie’.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes it also said, ‘thou shalt not steal’. Plus somewhere in the middle said, ‘thou shalt not have sex with people you weren’t married to.’”
“Yeah, I remember it now,” the second post-modern said. “What a bunch of hooey. It’s a right wing, nutjob, racist document called the Ten Commandments.  It’s a religious document.”
“No Waldo,” the first replied. “That’s where you’re wrong. It ain’t no religious document. I just figured out it was a survival manual.”

Parking Lot

Hamas strikes at Israeli Nuclear Reactor

"Now what might a “reasonable” response look like?"

It would look like a parking lot where Gaza used to be.

Gay Marriage And The Nature Of Rights

 My reponse to this article at Reason: The Texas GOP Stands on a Platform of Ignorance

The sleight-of-hand in the gay marriage debate is the nature of the "rights" in question. The Bill of Rights is predominantly a charter of negative rights. All the rights enumerated in the bill of rights are of this nature: the government protects the right in question by simply not doing stuff to you.

There are no positive rights listed. Positive rights are "rights" where others are required to grant you something. They are popular in modern progressive Constitutions and U.N. charters: the "right" to health care (implies that someone has an obligation to provide you with health care whether they want to or not); the "right" to housing (implies that someone has the obligation to fork up the expense of housing you, whether they want to or not).

Libertarians are usually opposed to positive rights, because they require compelling the labor of others in order to provide you the "right."

Homosexuals already have the negative right of gay marriage. Just say "we're married." Nobody's stopping you.

The problem is that in the U.S., being married comes with a whole lot of "gimmes" that the government is obligated to provide: tax status, social security benefits, inheritance benefits, health care benefits, property rights.

All these are, if anything, positive rights, and can not be construed as the type of negative rights included among enumerated and unenumerated rights in the Bill of Rights.