19 Saturday Aug 2017
Posted in News and Notes
Tags
In his off time Santa works for the man. What a shame:
Spot Santa??? Carlos Slim’s Blog.
He’s getting too serious about the naughty stuff…
Seriously, it was almost nice to have a pointless clash of the leftists free speech rally that didn’t end with a homicide. Good on ya, Boston. My favorite big city.
And this hilarity gave me the needed post de jure. More pressing stuff in Spain, Russia, and D.C. but this is what you get.
You’re welcome and good night.
P
04 Friday Aug 2017
Posted in Other Columns
Seems the Civil War just won’t go away.
In Maryland the problem isn’t the crime, the unemployment, the illiteracy, the illegitimacy, or the false sense of entitlement. No, it’s a 17th Century Coat of Arms.
“When the General Assembly in 1904 adopted a banner of this design as the state flag, a link was forged between modern-day Maryland and the very earliest chapter of the proprietorship of the Calvert family.”
But the red and white part of the flag, known as the Crossland arms, was also the design flown by Marylanders who sympathized with the South in the Civil War, according to state records.
“During the war, Maryland-born Confederate soldiers used both the red-and-white colors and the cross bottony design from the Crossland quadrants of the Calvert coat of arms as a unique way of identifying their place of birth,” the records say. “Pins in the cross bottony shape were worn on uniforms, and the headquarters flag of the Maryland-born Confederate general Bradley T. Johnson was a red cross bottony on a white field.”
During the slow process of reconciliation after the Civil War ended in Union victory in 1865, a “flag incorporating alternating quadrants of the Calvert and Crossland colors began appearing at public events” in the state.
By extension of this “logic” all state flags are Confederate in nature – all states share the same hemisphere with those former CSA states once in rebellion…
Better tear down some monuments. Riot or something. Blame someone.
This is “racist.”
Seeing as how so many are obviously unhappy in 21st Century America, maybe it’s time they depart. To anywhere.
29 Saturday Jul 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
Tags
Alabama, Christianity, culture, England, Germany, identity politics, ISIS, politics, The West
Unlooked for, unprovoked, and whether you like it or not.
Two (three) examples in the recent news headlines:
Muslim gang rampaged through Liverpool attacking strangers because they were white “non-Muslims”. Who would ever expect to find white non-Muslims (Christians) in a place like England?! This was probably a reaction to all that “privilege;” and at least it didn’t involve a machete:
Machete-wielding man ‘screaming Allahu Akbar’ kills one person and injures several others during rampage in Hamburg supermarket. I’ve been wondering when “Aloha Snackbar!” would return this summer… In places like Hamburg the bladed attacks have become so prevalent that the Polizei now sport chain mail armor (Sixth Century problem, Sixth Century solution). The motives for the attack may never be known…
Both of these stories illustrate that the new realities will come upon you, out-of-the-blue, just because you are you. It also happened in Alabama:
Lesbian mom asks Christian judge to recuse himself from divorce case. It’s funny that you have to bake the cake but you can’t hear the case. These rules… The preemptive demand (and appeal) have failed thus far.
Look around and you’ll start to notice more and more of these stories, perhaps even involving you. Doubtless you did not ask for it, but it’s here nonetheless.
“British” “teens.” The Echo.
26 Wednesday Jul 2017
Posted in Other Columns
Tags
America, Anthony Esolen, book review, books, culture, education, society, Vox Day
Americans aren’t just increasingly fat; they’re increasingly stupid.
Today, Vox Day noted the decline in the average college IQ over the past six decades. We’re collectively down 12.3 points, almost a whole SD. It kind of matters. Smaller brains and larger waistlines so not make for a good or viable trend.
I also read a review of sorts by Chris Sullivan of Anthony Esolen’s Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. Esolen may have some answers for the academic decline and more.
Anthony Esolen, a professor at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire and recently of Providence College, Rhode Island, has written a stinging critique of modern education and American society in general titled Out Of The Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture published by Regnery Publishers, 2017.
It’s a short book – 203 pages – but contains much wise social commentary and observations on everything wrong with American education, if there’s any such thing. Esolen is not one to beat around the bush. If you don’t agree with him it isn’t because he is opaque. For instance, chapter one is titled, Giving Things Their Proper Names: The Restoration Of Truth Telling. It is divided into several sections with their own headings, one of which is Are We a World of Liars?
“In a word, yes.
…
It was the education angle and the fact of Thomas Moore College that caught my attention. TMC may be the best deal in the country for affordable, quality higher education, Catholic or otherwise. I want my daughter to consider the school.
Anyway, I bought a copy on Kindle this morning. I’m planning to start reading it tonight. If warranted, and time allowing, I’ll post a review here and at Amazon. Chapter Four is: Man by Nature Desires to Know: Rebuilding the College.
That’s important to me and should be to all Americans. Most of our “schools” have become anti-intellectual, places where knowing is the last thing desired.
Looks good from my cursory overview. I’ll let you know.
Esolen/Regnery.
26 Wednesday Jul 2017
Posted in News and Notes
We’re number one! We’re #1! USA! USA!
Americans are the fattest people on an increasingly plump planet.
Life threatening obesity has become a worldwide epidemic, with 711 million overweight around the globe led by French fry loving Americans.
A detailed report in the latest New England Journal of Medicine is winning alarmed attention in Washington because it finds that American children and adults are leading the obesity parade.
“The highest level of age-standardized childhood obesity was observed in the United States, 12.7 percent,” said the report.
1 in 5 adults in the OECD area is obese. How does your country compare?
“The United States and China had the highest numbers of obese adults,” added the authoritative study.
Obesity is no secret in the U.S., but the continued domestic epidemic, especially after the former Obama administration declared war on it, is alarming officials.
Rest of the world, keep your high: school achievements, IQs, standards of living, and pleasantness. USA number ONE! Da Super Size Nation!
NPD Group.
I post this when I should be cashing in… Wrapping up the FP fitness chapter; book forthcoming. Someone needs it…
25 Tuesday Jul 2017
Posted in Other Columns
In a move to run off any man still left on campus Princeton currently seeks a “Interpersonal Violence Clinician and Men’s Engagement Manager:”
Are young men at Princeton University violent, aggressive, hyper-masculine, stalkers, or rapists?
A new position at the Ivy League institution indicates campus officials apparently think enough of its male students grapple with such problems that it warrants hiring a certified clinician dedicated to combating them.
The university is in the process of hiring an “Interpersonal Violence Clinician and Men’s Engagement Manager” who will work with a campus office called SHARE that’s dedicated to “survivors” of sexual harassment, assault, dating violence and stalking.
First they should change the title from Engagement MANager to something more progressive, more fitting, like “Gyne-ager” or Trans-ager.” And lose the “engagement” as well – sounds to active, too potentially masculine.
The new employee (will NOT be a straight, white man for certain) will need a background and degree in social justice work or womyn’s “studies” or some such BS. She or … It … will likely pull down six figures. The job of the new otherkin will be to aggressively hunt down and destroy the last vestiges of manliness at the former Ivy League University.
She or It should move immediately to kill the association with John Witherspoon, a signer of the manly Declaration of Independence. Far too masculine! Independence is date rape!
The persecution rolls on, unabated seemingly.
Mantra of the Poison Ivy League. Someone’s YouTube.
For all this social engineering garbage, Princeton charges the very reasonable yearly fee of $43,450 ($61,160, all frills included)! What a bargain!
Support this nonsense at your own risk, financial, social, and ideological.
25 Tuesday Jul 2017
Posted in Other Columns
Tags
For the record I did not watch the great Michael Phelps race the fake Great White. Many did – and were not happy about the spectacle.
Remember back in December 2014, when Discovery Channel hyped that a man would be eaten and then regurgitated by a giant snake on a special called “Eaten Alive?” Then that didn’t actually happen, and viewers were furious?
We bring this up because 57 minutes into Discovery’s heavily promoted Sunday night Shark Week program — in which Olympic powerhouse swimmer Michael Phelps was set to race against a great white shark — viewers heard this quote from ecologist Tristan Gutteridge, one the featured scientists:
“Clearly, we can’t put Michael in one lane and a white shark on the far lane. We’re gonna have to do a simulation.”
Hold on. So Phelps wasn’t going to actually race a shark in a TV event titled “Phelps vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White”?! Why was the hour-long special billed as such?
While common sense probably could have saved any disappointment — along with preshow interviews where Phelps assured everyone that he wouldn’t really race next to a shark in open water — many viewers were not pleased.
Yeah, it’s television, it’s all bullshark. Twitter/WP.
I did not watch, and was not disappointed, for two reasons: 1) I don’t waste time on TeeVee, and; 2) I didn’t care. When I first heard of the possibility of Phelps racing a real shark, my initial thought was, “I hope they find a shark named ‘Darwin’.”
Seems Phelps and the producers aren’t entirely stupid. Some viewers are.
I think they could have put in a real shark with a high degree of safety and a very high degree of cost. A net or plexiglass barrier would have sufficed. Such would have been too expensive, costing far more than some creative 1s and 0s in a computer.
You get what you pay for. Or what you watch.
With a very few exceptions television has been intellectually dead for decades. Anyone who spends time staring at Plato’s electronic cave wall deserves to be disappointed. And they almost uniformly are.
Batman, Fonzie, and Phelps. Who’s next?
Twitter.
And Phelps lost…
24 Monday Jul 2017
Posted in News and Notes
Tags
America, Appalachia, culture, disturbia, economy, family, government, North Carolina, society
So I just returned from an all-too-short vaca in the mountains – far and away my favorite place. The experience, as always, was near picture perfect.
Part of the reason I seek out the remoteness is to get away from the utter madness and bother of the reality of falling America. Bluntly, I like to leave the post-modern people behind.
Yet, even in the hills, I found it hard to escape the new realities, this time around.
Two things before I go any further:
One, I in no way, here, disparage the people of Appalachia, nor Bryson City, nor that town’s fine newspaper. This is more of a warning to them or, better, a warning to us, through them.
Two, the following reminded me of an older movie about the region in which an elderly woman stubbornly refuses to give her land to some government agent. I cannot recall the name at this time…
Anyway, somehow amidst all my hiking, riding, musing, etc., I found a copy of the Smokey Mountain Times. THIS ONE, for Thursday, July 20, 2017.
Those children look happy and probably are. Maybe we shouldn’t be. SM Times.
It’s a paper, like that of many smaller towns, of feel-good news. I, for instance, did not know about the coming eclipse until late last week. Snorkeling is fun. Planning the week can be beneficial.
But two headlines grabbed my attention, my jaded attention.
The Military is bringing free healthcare?
Last week I had a big rant about how bad the American “healthcare” system really is. And it is bad. But is this the solution?
Undoubtedly many will reap the rewards of the care. That is a good thing in itself. But the issue isn’t wholly self-contained. My main point is that this isn’t how it’s supposed to work in a free and prosperous country – accepting government handouts for basic care.
For charity’s sake, are there no local doctors or nurses available?
And accepting the freebies from the imperial military at that?! Since when was the role of the military to bring free medical services to mountain people? Posse Comitatus? Well, probably not, not here. I can’t see this as the enforcement of any civil law. And I doubt anyone would complain anyway, because free.
But this is an intrusion, in a most unobtrusive manner, of the standing army into daily lives. It’s big government, at its best, doing its worst. It’s a demeaning admission that something is terribly wrong. It’s just as bad as this:
We need “Feeding Programs” in America? And they’re growing?
How the hell is any of this good? Well, outside of some hungry people getting meals, how is it good culturally, systemically? It isn’t.
This is further admission of gross failure. Your government and its owners have so wrecked the economy (and you’ve helped them right along – vote, vote, vote) to the point that the only solution is to accept more government handouts for basic needs.
It’s bad enough that we collectively turn our children over to the Great Father in Washington or Raleigh during the school year. Raising and feeding your kids is your responsibility. It’s not the government’s. Now, it seems, the children need Uncle Sucker’s help to eat during the summer months.
We shouldn’t even have a U.S. Department of Agriculture, let alone have it run a “feeding program” for our children (maybe some adults).
Are there no families or independent churches to do this for the parents?
Again, bluntly put, these two stories sound like something of an aid program designed for some third world country. “Feeding programs” and free medicine seem more suited for Rwanda than North Carolina.
Maybe the 21st century is seeing the blurring of the two worlds.
In that old movie, the older woman was as proud as any in the region ever was. She embodied the spirit of Appalachia, of America – defiant even in seeming poverty – independent. The land agent tried to swindle her into signing away her land, her freedom, for some fake welfare BS. She wasn’t having it and blatantly stated why. What was her’s was her’s and she did not need any “help.” I really wish I could remember the name of the film.
There’s a concept the people of Swain County and the rest of what’s left of this country need to remember. Independence and self-reliance are freedom. Handouts and graft, no matter how well-intentioned or how well received, represent slavery.
Sallust, saw his name yesterday on the back cover of a Loeb Classic, warned us that this is all most people hope for. I hope the great people of Appalachia, like their elevation, are just a notch above.
There is no free lunch, nor free doctor.
19 Wednesday Jul 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, Other Columns
Tags
America, culture, decline, John Whitehead, society, The People, Zombies
John Whitehead comments, in the wake of George Romero’s death, on the zombie-fication of America.
Just take a look around you.
“We the people” have become the walking dead of the American police state.
We’re still plagued by the socio-political evils of cultural apathy, materialism, domestic militarism and racism that Romero depicted in his Night of the Living Dead trilogy.
Romero’s zombies have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, as well.
Indeed, you don’t have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters, running for their lives in 5K charity races, and putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
In fact, the CDC put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.”
Zombies also embody the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.
Case in point: in AMC’s hit television series The Walking Dead and the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, it’s not just flesh-eating ghouls and cannibalistic humans that survivors have to worry about but the police state “tasked with protecting the vulnerable” that poses some of the gravest threats to the citizenry.
I’ve written about “The Walking Dead,” the TV show, over at FP a few times. But I’ve never seen any of it. I don’t have to as I live in modern America. I see zombies out and about every day.
Whitehead’s column is a short tour de force on the command and control accepted from them the police state.
I think what little he misses is the acceptance part. The people are more than happy to roll over or lie down for anything, no matter how egregious, so long as the TV, the phone, and the AC work and the beer and fast food flows.
A friend of mine is fond of saying, “We’re in the zombie apocalypse. It’s just not the cool kind.”
SHTF Plan.
Don’t be infected. Resist. Unplug and free yourselves. Be survivors.
They really do want your brains.
15 Saturday Jul 2017
Posted in Other Columns
Paul Craig Roberts reminisces from out the tattered remains of the post-modern nation:
…
He could remember riding his horse into the town three miles from his grandparents’ farm with a real pistol strapped to his side and a rifle in the scabbard when he was 12 or 13. No one said a thing. Today a SWAT team would be on the scene. He would be lucky not to be shot dead and never know the fate of his grandparents, who would be guilty of all sorts of offenses, including failure to supervise a minor.
That reminded him of what he had recently read in a newspaper. On a cul-de-sac devoid of car traffic a mother sat in a chair outside the house while her child played in the front lawn. A busybody neighbor, trained to report parental malfeasance, whose view of the mother was blocked by shrubbery, saw an unsupervised child at play and called the police. When the police arrived, they arrested the mother on the basis of the unverified report from the neighbor. The mother was taken to jail. The newspaper did not say what had happened to the child, whether the kid was taken to foster care and whether the husband had to rush home from his job and ply lawyers with money to help put his family back together. These kinds of horrors inflicted on families by public authorities often have worse consequences than the predations of criminals. He wondered if parents and children would be safer if the police were disbanded and outlawed.
Yet, society had accepted these abuses as justified. What, he thought, would have been the public reaction when he was a kid? The policemen would have been fired, the chief disciplined, and the mayor would have lost the next election. It would not have been possible for them to become heroes by destroying a family. The busybody neighbor would have become a pariah in the community.
Just the other day he had seen a grandmother at the supermarket with tattoos and face piercings. A grandmother? How had this come about? At the mountain resort pool and exercise center it wasn’t just the men. He had seen young women who were covered in tattoos. A friend told him that some women not only had face and tongue piercings, but also navel, labia, and clitoris piercings. Piercings were what he remembered from boyhood days of looking through stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. Articles explained with words and photographs facial piercing practices by tribes in “darkest Africa.” Now they were the practices of upper class womyn who played in resorts.
…
Read that one, especially if you’re over 40. It’s a totally different country today, maybe not for the better. Ignorance, sloth, and weakness masquerade as individuality and liberation. And with the dumbing down comes a constant lose of freedom.
For a more in-depth look back, please buy and read the following, which I recalled as I nodded along with Roberts:
Liddy / Amazon.
The lost past.
The sad present.
The better future is at: Patreon, with Perrin.
