Obama sees where the problem is.

Speaking of Obama, the post-racial President of All the People, there are three stories on Drudge right now:

Black gangs terrorize Miami

Black gangs terrorize Boston

Obama cracks down on big city cops being too hard on Blacks.

Barack Obama's fuzzy little brain

Cartoon reproduced by permission of baloocartoons.com

There are two kinds of looters.  Most are just sociopaths, who have no problem taking what doesn't belong to them. The other kind consists of people who think they deserve what other people have because somehow, the stuff was stolen from them in the first place.  Which kind is Obama?  Oh, sure, he's a looter.  He gladly accepts money, bribes, adulation, and fawning in return for no effort on his part. He may have done less actual work in his life of ease than George Bush had done at his age.  He was taught by his flaky mother, when she happened to be around, that Whitey was the enemy and the reason for the poor performance of everybody but Whitey.  And his nutcase White grandfather kept the beat up, and I can't say about his grandmother.  She seems to be the only one in the family who did any actual work.  Anyhow, Obama absorbed that 'victim' mentality at an early age, and he's always been surrounded by sycophants repeating the same mantra.  Obama has no problem looting the middle class to provide freebies for others, because, hey, anybody who has any money probably stole it.

And Obama has no problem with robbing the middle class not only to provide goodies for the poor, but also goodies for the rich!  Because these rich people are with the program, actually instructing him in how best to rip off the productive class of people for the benefit of parasites.  Guys like Soros are part of the good guy gang, you see, and the fact that he's outrageously wealthy is no big deal, because he's working for the revolution.

Obama disgusts me, much as did Bush and Clinton, and I'm a White guy, trained from birth to give fifty points to any minority group before judging them, because of millenia of domination and oppression yadda yadda yadda.  I think if I were Black, he'd disgust me even more, because not only is he trying to wreck everything, but if I were Black, he'd be giving me a bad name while he's doing it.

Tom Sowell is Black, and he's certainly had a bellyful of Obama's foolishness.  His latest column on the subject HERE.

Neither fish nor fowl

At the extremes, you have socialism and free-market capitalism.  Socialism means that the government controls or owns the means of production and distribution.  Free-market capitalism means that it doesn't, and individuals come up with business enterprises and invest their money and energy and get to keep the profits if profits are made. Obviously, no pure case of either exists.  The biggest problem with all this when people think that the system we have now is free-market capitalism, and therefore blame our problems on that system, rather than the system we actually have, which is tricky to name or describe.

Some would call it fascism, a word I try to avoid, because it's been overused and abused and means many different things to different people.  Especially, it's a very common word in Marxist jargon, so I say avoid it unless you're actually talking about Mussolini.

A better term might be state capitalism or mercantilism.  Our system, at this point, consists of what they like to call a "partnership" between government and business, which sounds really good and benign, but is actually a pretty corrupt setup.  We're now in the middle of a long series of "bailouts" of supposedly private business — banks, auto companies, industry in general — which essentially means that costs are socialized and profits are privatized.  The worst of both worlds.  The genius of free-market capitalism is that good ideas are rewarded and bad ideas are punished.  That is, good business decisions make money and bad business decisions lose money.  Now, I'm well aware that money isn't everything, and there are good business decisions that, in my opinion, are bad business decisions for society in general, although they do make money.  Common businesses that many of us dislike for the consequences of what they do would include tobacco, prostitution, etc.  That's a separate issue.  A given society can find ways to discourage businesses that it deems bad of society.  An aside — within libertarianism, there's a cottage industry that tries to show that all these "bad" businesses are actually, ultimately, good for society.  I personally think that such reasoning is often tortured and flawed, but, as I say, that's a separate issue and not what I'm talking about here.

The problem is that socialization of costs and privatization of profits.  That means that bad business decisions are rewarded (through bailouts, most prominently) and good business decisions are punished (through taxation, usually).

A more subtle instance of this is the illegal-alien, cheap-labor phenomenon.  Yes, illegals work cheap and many will tell you that therefore the products and services provided by their labor are made cheaper, and that's good for society.  So the profits are privatized.  Their employers cut their costs, and, consequently, are able to sell cheaper, and, therefore, part of that profit is passed on to their customers.  But that leaves out a big factor.  The employers pays some of the costs in wages (and very seldom, as we all know, in benefits) but what about other costs?  There are many more costs than wages, and who pays those?  The most obvious extra costs are the many layers of social services that go to the illegals.  Most obviously, welfare costs, including direct aid to the children of illegals, many of whom were born here and therefore qualify for big subsidies — because of the low wages their parents get,  It gets worse.  Some of their kids are illegals themselves, having been brought in by their parents illegally. In some idiotic states, this even includes giving such kids — illegal aliens, remember — in-state tuition at universities.  The liberals/neocons will tell you that these are not subsidies of illegals, but subsidies of American citizens, and therefor should be counted as costs for illegals, which is monumentally disingenuous. And then you have food stamps, and the free-food giveaways you find everywhere, and the Affirmative Action that makes sure all kinds of subsidies go to minorities (illegals overwhelmingly qualify as minorities, of course), special mortgage deals (that contributed to the mortgage meltdown we're still reeling from, and which necessitates more government subsidies), and the government extra payouts for dealing with the crime rate increased by illegals, and the extra money education costs for their offspring.  BTW, illegal offspring often qualify for ESL classes, which cost more money still.  And who pays for all these extra costs not covered by the paltry wages?  Yep, taxpayers, the same people who are allegedly benefitted by the fact that a head of lettuce costs two cents less because of cheap illegal labor.  Now, the employers are fine with that.  Society as a whole pays the extra costs, and the employers' share of them are pretty tiny compared to the enormous extra profits they make by using cheap labor.  This you call free-market capitalism?  Hardly.

And there's also the cute notion, bruited about by liberals/neocons (and, alas, many libertarians) that illegals make up for these social costs by the taxes they pay.  Nope.  In sum, illegals absorb a lot more social spending than they pay for.  If you doubt that, read Edwin S. Rubenstein's analysis of the situation Here.

Religious Law

I think we've all heard enough about Islamic law, called "Sharia," to know that we don't want it imported into the West, the nutcase Archbishop of Canterbury notwithstanding.   We have a long tradition of separation of church and state in the West. Even in countries where there's an established church, religious law is considered separate from civil law, and the government authorities are not permitted to enforce religious laws.  Now, before everybody e-mails me in to tell me so, I'm well aware that there are many Muslims in the West and other places who would concur with this attitude, and want religious law to be kept out of civil life.  Problem is, the very religion they adhere to disagrees with them.  If they hold tight to Western thinking in this regard, will their spouses and kids and cousins, etc., who follow them to the West agree?

Like I said, Christianity, whatever attitude it may once have had, is pretty much reconciled with keeping government laws separate, and enforcing religious laws, what's left of them, with excommunication, shunning, or lesser penalties like yelling and denouncing, never using force, and never calling on the Government to use force on their behalf.  This is confused a bit by many on the left who insist on considering laws against, say, abortion, to be religious laws.  Nonsense.  Officially atheist countries like Communist Rumania prohibited abortion, certainly not based on any religion or religious laws.  Indeed, any religion worth its salt will certainly have religious laws that overlap with secular laws — like laws against murder, theft, etc.  A big chunk of the Ten Commandments are mirrored in secular law.

Anyhow, I don't want anybody's religious laws that don't overlap with sensible secular laws to be allowed to clash with secular law, either by being elevated by the State to the status of law, or by being given special exceptions by the Government.

I especially don't want religious laws that flat-out contradict secular law, like laws permitting and even requiring honor killings, female circumcision, witch-burning, cannibalism, etc.  People who insist on observing such laws have no place in our culture.  Sorry.  I'm all for them keeping their system the way they want it in their own countries, but I absolutely oppose it in ours.

Now, there are a lot of religions out there, and it's kind of hard to keep track.  But there's a weird medieval-sounding law called Mesirah that is totally out of place in our culture or indeed any culture that lays claim to civilization.  Any adherent of the religion should denounce it from the rooftops (and many have, I understand) before he can be considered a worthy citizen.  It breaks down the whole Western notion of civic duty and responsibily that we've had in the West since Roman times. Read about it HERE.

White Liberals and American Indians

One of the more idiotic expressions of the self-hatred of White Liberals is their "sensitivity" to the pretended offense taken by self-styled American Indian leaders at the use of just about any imagery or words with an Amerindian connection for anything whatsoever.  Usually, it manifests as somebody somehow taking offense at names for sports teams, like "Redskins," or "Braves."  What the hell is going on there?  The names are obviously chosen because Amerindian things suggest a warlike, noble spirit, right?  So the "leaders" who raise a fuss and the lickspittle liberals who fawn over them are phonies through and through.

Of course, the Amerindian "spokesmen" phonies aren't actually offended, and the White Liberals aren't actually contrite.  The former are puffing up their own egos, and the latter are showing their superiority to everybody, especially other Whites, because they're so much more caring and sensitive than the rest of us.

Bad Eagle doesn't care for White Liberals, and seems to care even less for phony Indian leaders.  His reaction to the latest "Geronimo" flap HERE.

Guilt by Association

This is a wonderful example of not only guilt by association, but even three- or four-cushion guilt by association,.

VDare is a website advocating the enforcement of immigration laws, and also improving them.  Since this is out of phase with the dominant liberal/neocon establishment, VDare is routinely called 'racist' with no evidence whatsoever, and in the case I'm referring to, even 'White Supremacist.'

Now, the downright venerable Steve Sailer writes for VDare, and of course, in the mind of the establishment, that makes him a racist.

Steve Sailer at one time or another evidently quoted James Burnham as saying "Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide", which it certainly is.  Jerry Pournelle has also used that quote.  On some forum or another, one of Pournelle's fans quoted Pournelle's quote.  He was berated for this, because, the berater said:


LOL, Pournelle is friends with Steve Sailer....You're quoting from a guy who is friends with the founder of VDare, a white supremacist group


So this is richly complicated stuff.  If I'm not totally confused, it looks like A quoted B to make a point, but both C and D had used that quote before, and D writes for E, a website that calls for immigration restriction.  Therefore, the use of the quote is invalid and worthy of derision.


This took place on Jerry Pournelle's blog HERE.

Scott Adams has seen the future....

Cartoon reprinted by permission of  baloocartoons.com

...And he likes it!  Unlike the old coot in the cartoon, he's in the groove, going with the flow, and keeping it real — virtually real, anyway.  He explains to us his theory of the abolition of man HERE.

Feminism — stupid or evil or both?

When did witches get cute, anyway?  I grew up thinking of them as pretty damn ugly and scary. (I'm 65.)  My default mental picture of a witch is the one in Snow White, who scared the bejeezus out of me and my contemporaries way back when.  I think there was a comic book character at the time, "Wendy the Witch," who was cute, but I somehow missed that one, obsessed as I was with Little Lulu and Plastic Man.  And then there was the Wicked Witch in Oz.  Well, I'm trying to draw a tortured analogy here about feminists.  For one thing, the feminists in the old days were a much less regimented group.  By the old days, I mean 1900.  Then they were actually pretty reasonable.  They wanted more female access to education, which was perfectly reasonable.  The wanted the vote for women, too, which, at the time, sounded reasonable, but which has certainly not cut down on the number of wars we have (Feminists still say that if women were in charge we wouldn't have wars.  Yeah, right.)  Well, there's little connection between today's feminists and those bloomer gals.  Today, feminists are essentially a branch of Marxism, and the undisputed masters of doublethink.  Remember when Larry Summers screwed up and alluded to a possible innate sexual difference in the brain that might explain lack of female prominence in math and hard science.  One feminist, who was certain that there are no innate differences, had an extraordinarily stereotypically female reaction.  Stuart Taylor wrote:


The most remarkable feminist exercise in self-parody was that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who famously told reporters that she "felt I was going to be sick," that "my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,"


Poor, delicate thing.

Since then, they've even gotten sillier.  Evidently, some have expressed outrage that Seal Team Six is a stag organization.  I mean, they've been seeing female supersoldiers on the screen since Emma Peel, so it's hard to believe they can't recruit a Demi Moore lookalike for such a job.

And now it's become impossible for women at Yale to show how tough they are, because of icky boys who make fun of them.  Heather MacDonald reports on this sorry state of affairs HERE.

Self-Herding Sheep

We were all afraid that OneSTDV was going to quit blogging, but now he's back, showing us a video about sheep learning to herd themselves.  Take a look HERE.

Show some remorse, or Obama will get you.

You know the feeling.  Some wonderful progressive phenomenon takes place, and for some perverse, atavistic reason, there's something deep inside you that doesn't like it?  This current big news story about teaching GENDER DIVERSITY to kindergarteners, for example.  This is the sort of thing we should all applaud.  Teaching little kids who are still confused about which restroom to use that there are actually three genders, or seven, or whatever.  And you know in your heart that you, as an evil White person, should get out of the way to deliver special privileges via Affirmative Action to just about everybody who isn't of your nasty ethnic group.  And you should pay some more taxes to effectuate it.  You also know, because of the insightful new concept of multiculturalism, that all cultures are equal (except maybe yours) and that the aversion you feel to female genital mutilation and wife beating and polygamy and even cannibalism is nothing more than your own stupid, knee-jerk reaction based on centuries of narrow-minded Western thinking.  And, this embarrassing old fogey notion you have that maybe some cultures are superior to others is surpassed only by your fascist notion that human races might differ in some way, or even that they exist in the first place. Race, you know, is a social construct.

Anyhow, don't try to hide it.  You do have these unworthy feelings from time to time, and the only thing left for you to do is abase yourself and apologize for yourself, your race, your religion, your ethnic group, your country, and anything else that characterizes you.  Now, it's very hard to do this, and the nomenklatura are very busy with other things and don't have time to coach you.  So Christian Miller shows you the path HERE.

The Bibi Groupies of Congress

Bibi certainly got a lot of applause from Congress after he took Obama down a peg or two.  Lots of standing ovations.  Indeed, the feverish, almost obsessive hand-clapping reminds Steve Sailer of other people in history who had the knack of getting a lot of applause.  Not all that long ago, either.  Read it HERE.

Is Satire even Possible?

We've come to a strange place when it's hard to tell the difference between reality and satire/parody.  It's not easy for a stand-up comic to exaggerate the antics of celebrities, because they're always pushing the envelope.  Sometimes the only thing a satirist can do is talk about something real, without the usual euphemisms — that's the strategy in this story from THE ONION.

The Patriot Pack

Fred's in a bit of a bad mood.  He's denouncing patriotism HERE.  Now, I know just what he means and how he feels, but I think he's taking an unnecessarily cynical spin on a set of fact.  Better read Fred first before I start ranting.  I'll wait.....................................

Read  it?  Good.  Now, he's equating the pack instinct with patrotism, which is quite valid. We are a pack animal.  We're apes who, to a large extent, became wolflike in behavior, and that behavior includes a pack mentality.  It's nicer to think of ourselves as a pack of wolves than as a flock of sheep, come to think of it.  In any case, everything that we are has an analog in animal behavior, because, after all, we are animals and follow the same Darwinian path.  The problem with Fred's analysis is that he is too quick to put a big value judgement on the situation.  His very reaction is itself an example of pack mentality because he's concerned about the bad effects the patriotism/packism has on the rest of his pack.  He's extended his pack to humanity, not just his country.  So pack mentality is just a fact, not a manifestation of good or evil.  It's a description of one characteristic of the human race.  Not all animals are pack animals, of course.  I understand that leopards, for example, are solitary, in contrast to their lion relatives, who always operate in packs.

Our pack mentality is just one of many human characteristics that have proved to be adaptable and are now part of our makeup.  And it's misleading to make a value judgment about them.  The fact is that they're there, and they're not to be repressed or ignored.  That leads to extremely bad policy, on the personal or national level.  And flaky and/or malignant intellectuals are always ready with a new theory that brushes science aside and lays plans for a new utopia that will, through education or something, eliminate all innate human characteristics and people will end up behaving the way intellectuals think they should.  Marxism is the most obvious of these.

I digress.  We are a pack animal, and we're inclined to form in-groups and oppose outsiders.  We're not going to change that, so the problem is to channel this in-group tendency into the most benign results.  One important component to this is to recognize that some group formulations are more natural and easily dealt with than others.  We first of all tend to consider blood relatives a natural in-group, and that can be seen operating all through human history.  These family groups will grow and become tribes, and the tribes grow or merge to become nations.  When you try to form a nation any other way, by trying to force in-groups together that are not compatible with one another, you have trouble.  Our current notion that all immigrants are equal is an example of that.  See HERE.  And once you've decided what your in-group is going to consist of, you have to consider who's calling the shots.  The war that Fred rightly deplores is of course arranged by the Alpha wolves of the in-groups, so the most important thing the in-group can do is pick the right Alpha wolf.  He has to be strong, of course, and trustworthy, but he also should be an unambiguous member of the in-group.  That way, his first priority is the welfare of the in-group, not some vague abstraction or ideology that he considers more important than the in-group's welfare.  He can't go around putting the welfare of other groups ahead of his own.  This leads to war that is not in the interest of his own group.  Is this beginning to sound familiar?  So I'd say to Fred, fine, we're a pack animal, and there's nothing immoral about a pack working for its own welfare.  The problems come when the packs are confused, and act in ways that are self-destructive.  Obviously, pointless wars are not in the group's interest, and if members of the group push for them anyway, they are, by any reasonable definition, no longer worthwhile members of the group and should either be brought into line or exiled.  So much depends on the Alpha Wolf.

You want cute? — I'LL give you cute!

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  The Japanese practically have a monopoly on cute.  The video below is done with Vocaloid software, I gather.  I have an inclination to get hold of some and play with it, but I bet it would be a supreme time waster.  Well, if you like Bach, you'll like Pachelbel, and if you don't like either one, you'll probably like this anyway.  Give it a listen.

Oh, there's more of Hatsune Miku HERE and HERE.

Nationalism by Proxy

Are we a propositional nation?  You know the term.  It's the notion that a nation is based on a set of ideas, rather than a group of people.  Offhand, it sounds reasonable and praiseworthy. Most nations are based on lineage.  All Danes are related to each other.  They're genetically similar.  They think in terms of being descended from a common ancestor.  Americans, given our explicitly propositional founding, and lots of unhealthy developments since then, are trained to reject any notions of ethnic or racial solidarity.

Buy I realized some time ago that ideas like the Constitution don't come out of thin air, but are produced by centuries of evolution of thought, passed down through cultures, which are, for the most part, passed down to actual genetic offspring.  It's not an accident that the Constitution was written by a bunch of White guys who benefitted from the ideas evolved in Europe, and especially Britain, for many centuries.

In fact, some would say that the American "proposition" was a set of ideas that had been circulating in the West ever since the Ancient Greeks, and the Founding Fathers' accomplishment consisted of putting them down on paper in a systematic way.  Other groups copied that Constitution later, but since the ideas in it were not really an organic part of the cultures of those groups, these cloned constitutions were pretty much window dressing.  The Soviet Union had a constitution that sounded great, but there wasn't any tradition of liberty or self-government there, so the constitution was totally ignored.

But Americans took the Constitution seriously, because we had traditions of liberty, and yes, even individualism and distrust of government that goes way, way back.  We even fought a Civil War that largely hinged on interpretation of that Constitution.  And that wasn't because we were a propositional nation — it was because we were an ethnostate, and our ethnic group has the characteristic of constitutionalism as a value.

But all that is gone.  The ethnostate is a taboo idea in America and Western Europe and the mainly White nations that are cultural colonies of Western Europe.  Our politicians, virtually all of them in America and Britain, and most of them in Western Europe, tirelessly work to destroy the very notion of the ethnostate and call for immigration from anywhere and everywhere, any race, any religion, because the concept of human differences is itself a taboo.

Now, once you've tossed out the concept of an ethnic basis for a country, nationalism is impossible, because a 'nation' is an ethnic group.  Basically, I think that the boundaries of an ethnic group make a pretty good set of boundaries for a country.  When your boundaries include so many ethnic groups that there's no longer a dominant core majority ethnic group, you no longer have a nation, but an empire.  And empires are notoriously difficult to hold together.  We're an empire.

Now, human beings are a rambunctious group, and now and then a whole nation will decide to modify itself towards the value system of another nation.  Scotland did that once, and absorbed a lot of Englishness from England, including the language, the scientific tradition, etc.  And then began to participate in this new, overarching superculture that they found a way to fit themselves into.  Japan has been doing the same thing at least since the Meiji Restoration.

But for the most part, people cling to their own cultural norms and values, even when they immigrate.  The United States, in the past, attracted a lot of immigrants from Western Europe who did want to assimilate — giving up their languages and customs in favor of American equivalents, etc. — partly because that was before we had a gang of liberals meeting every boat to sign immigrants up for welfare and food stamps and affirmative action and a bunch of other freebies, so we were attracting people who wanted to be us, not live off of us.  And also because for Brits and Germans and Scandinavians, hardly any assimilation was required to fit right in — most of their cultural attributes were close to, or identical with, American ones.  So for a long time, there wasn't all that much contradiction between the notions of a propositional nation and an ethnostate.

But now it's all propositional, and it's deemed perfectly all right to have American citizens who retain citizenship in their countries of origin (think of it as "civic bigamy"), and retain all of their original cultural norms, no matter how incompatible they might be with American ones.  And we're expected to adapt to them, and certainly not require them to adapt to us.  They can even get advanced degrees in the subject of studying their own ethic background.  We even pride ourselves on having elected a guy with at least three probably foreign citizenships to the Presidency. So our nationalism is out the window.  But, like all homo sapiens, we have a tribal, nationalistic urge, and it's very frustrating to have all our tendencies towards a national feeling described as racist or fascist or 'White privilege,' or whatever the current trendy buzz word is.  So the tireless, insightful Steve Sailer has coined the term "Nationalism by Proxy."  Essentially, led by Neocon Likudniks, most of our political factions — liberals, neocons, conservatives, and the Tea Party group — knowing that American nationalism is taboo, have opted for vicarious nationalism by participating unconditionally in Israeli nationalism.  And that explains the half-serious joking you see all over the net about "Bibi for President."  The idea of a US President who hasn't fallen all over himself raving about the glories of lots and lots of immigration is kind of appealing to our psyche.  And Bibi is certainly not a guy who wallows in multiculturalism.  Try to visualize an American politician who was his actual counterpart, and then imagine what the media would do to him.  Steve's words on the subject HERE.

Russian Cartoon?

I've been getting awfully serious lately, so it's time again for some cultural delights!

This video is certainly about Russia, but when you look at it on YouTube, most of the comments seem to be in Hungarian.  Actually, I'm pretty sure that the language is Hungarian, not Russian. Whatever the case, it's extremely charming.  How come we only get animated cartoons from Japan?  Last stuff I remember from anywhere else was the Smurfs. Enjoy!

Gay rights vs. multiculturalism — What's a liberal to do?

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

There's also an old cartoon, I don't know who did it, where an environmental activist is saying to another environmental activist, "What do I do if I seen an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?"

Well, there's a problem with gay rights clashing with Muslim rights, and it's getting way out of hand in Europe.  The trouble with multiculturalism, where, you know, all cultures are equal, is that some of these cultures are against multiculturalism.  It's kind of like the Gödel's theorem of sociology.  Actually putting multiculturalism into practice, if done consistently and honestly, immediately results in the end of multiculturalism.  So, liberals, what do you do in this instance?  Enforced respect for a religion inevitable entails, like it or not, tolerance for the given religion's own intolerance.

Now, some libertarians and liberals and neocons, I've noticed, aren't concerned with outcomes, only intentions.  They'll happily kill us all with their rigorous adherence to principles that are good in theory, but are completely dysfunctional in practice.  We all know what happened to Pym Fortuyn back in 2002, don't we?  Well, here's what's happening in the Netherlands NOW.

Silly post

Lili Marlene Again

Everybody's been telling me that I've been getting too serious lately, and it's about time I posted Lili Marlene in Japanese again.  Here it is with the lyrics in subtitles.

I love the way Japan accepts things from Western Culture, modifies them, and gives them back for us to enjoy in a new way.  And they call me a xenophobe.

Invade the World, Invite the World!

Bomb them all to hell and then issue the survivors visas — What could possibly go wrong?  The title of this post, a quote from Steve Sailer, pretty much sums up our foreign policy and our immigration policy, as it has been at least since the Johnson Administration.  In the past, there was a notion that overseas intervention wasn't to be indulged in without a little prudent thinking first, and that any such intervention should be calculated to benefit American interests, not the interests of the people we invade.  But that's old fogey thinking, and Obama follows the post-LBJ (at least) tradition of regarding American military might as something to be at the disposal of the interests of every country except ours.  We invade Libya to help the Libyans out, not because such an invasion promotes any American interests at all.  Guess who's next on deck to be helped?  Beats me.

Another change that goes back to LBJ is the notion that no longer do we admit immigrants because we think they'll benefit this country.  No, that would, again, be old fogey thinking.  We admit them for their benefit, and any problems they might cause us — well, it's our duty to endure them.  If you're, say, a German engineer, get in line and we might let you in sometime.  A White refugee from Zimbabwe?  Forget it!  We don't have room for people like that.  An illiterate AIDS patient from Nigeria?  Roll out the red carpet!  That's what we're here for!  I got THIS LINK from Steve Sailer, too.

An interesting combination of these two Brave New World policies is our unique attitude towards the Muslim world, particularly its Arab component.  We seem to feel that it's completely moral and ethical for us to invade any of their countries whenever we deem it fitting to do so — usually arguing that we're doing them a good turn.  Coupled with that is our psychotic, self-destructive tendency to hand just about any inhabitant of such places visas and welcome them in, give them plenty of services, welfare, etc., and then, as I've argued before, expect them to Fit Right In, join the PTA, watch American Idol, keep their yard clean, and carefully not bring any outrageous customs with them.  Well, maybe some of them do.  But some of them surely don't.  And none of that seems to bother the President, the Congress, or the Judiciary.  They're all for it.  Have been for fifty years.  John Derbyshire tells us about the latest multicultural event perpetrated by a Yemeni immigrant HERE.

The Human RaceS — Note the "S"

Stupid liberal things to say:

"There's only one race — the human race!"

This nonsense is based on the linguistic glitch that we still refer to the human "race," which is an archaic meaning of the word.  The proper word is "species," in this context, and the human species is divided into five subspecies, or "races."  

Caucasoid,

Mongoloid,

Congoid,

Australoid,

Capoid.

"People are the same all over!"

This comes from a tendency of liberals to visit places around the world that are used to tourists, and where the only apparent differences are clothing and cuisine.  People most definitely are not the same all over.  Many of these differences are the result of human cultural difference, and, boy are there a lot of those!  Other differences are purely biological.  And some, probably most, differences can be attributed to both race and culture.

"Race doesn't exist — it's only a cultural construct."

This is a stupid thing that intellectual liberals say. It's pure nonsense, of course.  The physical, surface differences alone are obvious to anybody who hasn't been Orwellized by the establishment.  They support this assertion, when called on it, by further asserting that the differences are superficial, just the skin color.  That's not true, of course.  There are profound differences in physiognomy, hair, etc.  Well, they say, that's still all on the surface.  Wrong again.  As I think I said before, Temperance Brennan can look at a rib and tell you it's from a Caucasian female with 1/8 American Indian blood, 37 years old, who grew up in North Dakota.

The dopey intellectual having been shown that he doesn't know what he's talking about, he then says that the boundaries between so-called races are fuzzy, and therefore "race" is an invalid concept.  There's likely a  Latin term for that particular fallacy, but it's obvious that the line separating short people from average people and then tall people is certainly fuzzy, and therefore there's no such thing as height?

You also hear similar nonsense from Neocons, who, I hasten to point out, are just an excrescence of liberalism, and, unfortunately, you also hear it from some libertarians, who have spent far too much time hanging around with liberals and watching the View or something.

But, the human race has infinite variety in more ways than cultural or racial.  There's at least one very liberal guy who knows enough about anthropology not to believe this "race as myth" foolishness.  He not only doesn't believe it, but he takes deliberate steps to straighten the race deniers out.  His name is Robert Lindsay — not the Captain Pelew Robert Lindsay, but an American one.  He rails against the race-deniers HERE.

HWÆT, WE GAR-DENA....

I haven't seen the Beowulf movie, but I remember thinking when it came out that I'd love to see such a movie if Mel Gibson made it. His tendency to film movies in extinct languages with English subtitles is a very gutsy thing indeed. But it works. Reports are that he's doing the next best thing to Beowulf. A movie about vikings.

The PC crowd of course said his movie about Christ was anti-Semitic, and I don't know if they ever decided how to denounce Apocalypto, but I venture a guess that his next project will be widely declared racist. It's about vikings, after, all, the rednecks of their time, and just about as White a group as there is anywhere. Now, the politically correct thing to do is to have a diverse cast, like in the Thor movie (which should be boycotted). Now, a movie called The Vikings was done fifty years ago, and its stars were, rather comically, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, both of whom were Jewish. But they did their best to seem like vikings. They didn't play the roles wearing yarmulkes or trying to imply that the viking hordes were some kind of rainbow coalition. As I remember, Kirk Douglas pulled it off pretty well, but Tony Curtis, as always, sounded like a New York cab driver. I will be astounded and disappointed if Mel gets all inclusive, and casts Morgan Freeman as Eric the Red and Jeff Goldblum as Leif Erikson. But I don't think he will. Read about his project HERE.

And is it too late for a new REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE?

How to be a Democrat

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

For those of you libertarians and conservatives who are about ready to give up and voluntarily be assimilated by the Borg, I found this handy guide on the net so you can get started.

From "Libertarians 4 Freedom."

10 Commandments in the Democrat Party Playbook

1. Never concede a victory to Republicans, even if the nation suffers greatly as a result. If Republicans win an election, claim corruption and contest the outcome. Remember, no one has the right to be in power but Democrats. If all else fails, find an activist judge to overturn any Republican policy. Thwart the will of the people and the democratic process in any way necessary to get your way. Never forget………rules and civility are for wuss’s and not meant for you.
Always campaign against every Republican bill in Congress or any Republican idea, no matter what the benefit to America may be. Never agree with a Republican in public. Solidarity trumps truth and righteousness.

2. Always remember to use the deception that has brought us to power. For example, if you author a bill to raise taxes, name it “The Tax Reduction Bill.” If we need to confiscate more freedom, call the effort “The Increased Freedom Initiative.” That’s the way to get things done. By the time the “little people” figure it out, you will have stirred enough hatred against Republicans that they will still support you.

3. Whatever illegal and unethical thing Democrats are about to be exposed for doing, or are planning to do, instantly rush out and accuse Republicans of that exact infraction. Remember the 3 D’s. Distraction, diversion, and deception are our most powerful weapons.

4. Anytime you find someone supporting the Constitution and traditional American values, call them “extremists” and belittle their intelligence with name-calling. These people are obstacles to our overthrow of the American system and must be marginalized.

5. Always consider bi-partisanship, compromise and “fairness” as weaknesses to exploit. Lure Republicans into the false sense of bi-partisanship that will lower their guard, and they will be easier to destroy when you spring the trap.
Always stay vigilant and on guard against falling into the altruistic trap of American pride and patriotism. Those are also weaknesses to the exploit.

6. Repeat a lie often enough for our voter base to accept it as truth. Always spin a defeat as a victory for your side and your opponent’s victory as a failure, no matter how uncomfortable you may be in doing so. Remember, our voters are emotional, not logical, and they easily led to think what we tell them to think, and repeat what we tell them to repeat.

7. Never take sides against the Democrat Party leadership. Stand with your party NO MATTER WHAT. Always discourage the voters from considering the consequences of Democrat proposed legislation, and instead appeal to their stronger emotional urges. Remember to stir hatred, envy, and the divisiveness of class warfare, and you will “own” your voter base forever. Party first, country…….never. There is NO time this will not apply.

8. Never miss an opportunity to adopt and use double standards. That’s powerful tool to use against our enemies. Hold them accountable to a different standard than we practice, and you will be rewarded by your emotion-driven voter base who will never notice the difference.

9. Always side with America’s enemies against her. Remember, you are both on the same side against American liberty manifested in capitalism. Find a way to present America’s enemies as “victims.” And remember to always describe treason as “patriotism.”

10. Endeavor to punish the innocent in order to avoid punishing the guilty. This is the purpose of the Department Homeland Security and the excuse we use to impose gun control.

Winning the Peace in Palestine

As Lawrence could tell you, it's easier to win wars than peace. Anyhow, to expand on that last post, it strikes me the Obama's speech, the parts of it I heard and that have been spread around all over, anyway, actually, for the first time, made some sense. Now, U. S. Presidents have always chastised Israel to try to behave a little more civilized about its occupation of Palestinian lands, and maybe stop allowing so many batsh*t crazy "settlers" to knock down Arab homes and run them off their property. But they just about never listen, and they won't listen now. Obama is currently getting a knot jerked in his tail by AIPAC and their pals, and while what he said might encourage Palestinians, likely getting some of them killed, I guarantee that there'll be no follow-through on his part, and the largess will continue to flow from us to the Israeli Likudniks. If Obama doesn't get with their program, he won't get a second term. If he really stuck to his guns, he wouldn't get a second nomination.

Taki has been around awhile and has paid a lot of attention to this sort of thing. His reaction is HERE.

Kevin MacDonald interprets Netanyahu's behavior as indicating that he knows Obama is all talk and that our policy towards Israel and Palestine almost certainly will not change. His views HERE.

Neocons and Borders

Ever since Obama sort of announced that he's tired of being President, when he suggested that Israel return to its 1967 borders, the whole Neocon establishment has been having hissy-fits all over the place about this terrible act of anti-Semitism, or whatever Obama was thinking. Limbaugh is frothing at the mouth, as, I expect, are all the others. Funny how these Neocon types only mention Israel's borders. They never mention Poland's border or Uganda's or Liechtenstein's. And almost never even mention ours. Could it be that all borders other than Israel's are just trivial to them? I mean, there are a lot of countries with a lot of borders, and there are a lot of border disputes and quite a bit of violence involved in the disputes, but the Neocons' laser-like focus is on Israel's borders and no others. And to generalize, there's more to it than just the borders. They constantly harp on how Israel has "a right to exist." But they never seem to be interested in any other country's right to exist. Are non-Israeli borders and rights of existence unimportant to them? Or trivial? Or maybe, in contrast to Israel's borders and right to exist, other places don't really have such things. Or, if they do, they're at some lower level of metaphysical significance.

A typical Neocon, Jonah Goldberg, pictured above, made his views clear ten years ago. He says that Israel has more right to its territory than the United States has to its territory. And this is supposed to be a conservative guy, with all those American values and stuff. Don't take my word for it. Read what he said HERE.

Try not to fall near Marines

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

No comment necessary....

A Nation of Illegal Immigrants

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

This "Nation of Immigrants" chant is getting old, people. It didn't originate with Jack Kennedy's propaganda book — Harry Truman had used it, and others before him — but that's when the phrase got popular. It's a slogan, not a fact. Oh, as a fact it's trivially true, but then, just about all nations are nations of immigrants, if you go far enough back in history. If homo sapiens came into existence in East Africa, as is usually thought, then every country outside of East Africa is a nation of immigrants, right? Anyhow, as with any slogan, it doesn't carry a lot of information, and has to be interpreted, like "Arbeit macht frei," and "Мир, Земля, Хлеб."

Now, the purpose of the slogan is to make anybody who thinks we should have any rules at all about who we let in look silly. Coupled with copious repetition of the slogan, we have constant news stories about the remarkable virtues and abilities of illegal immigrants, especially those who were children when their parents entered illegally. Watching the media, you'd think that just about all of them are some kind of Übermenschen, getting PhD's at sixteen, squaring the circle, curing cancer, and turning water into wine. All this while the basic American type, Irving Babbits and Jukes and Kallikaks, are laying around in the yard, chewing tobacco, and doing disgusting redneck stuff when they're not being silk-hatted capitalists screwing the poor over.

And, you know, they always show you pictures of the cutest of the girls among them, who always look like Dora Exploradora, and carefully don't show you pictures of the average types.

Alexander Pope* famously said of vice, "we first endure, then pity, then embrace." That applies to illegal immigration, and we could add: "...then subsidize, then grant in-state tuition."

A. W. Morgan discusses this phenomenon HERE, starting with an illegal alien just granted an honorary degree for being illegal.

*Alexander Pope was an 18th-Century writer of whom, if you're under sixty, you've probably never heard, because he's largely been replaced in school curricula by Wymmyn's Studies, self-esteem, and Heather Has God Only Knows How Many Mommies.

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Feminists out to lunch again

The whole thing is getting so nasty, I guess it's time to run this picture.

This is the elegant feminist Sandra Bernhard, famous for threatening Sarah Palin with rape by her "big black brothers."

This is a Today Show piece on some actual rapes. Unfortunately, the show seems to focus on universities not having enough "programs." What they say is actually true, but the question is, what were these thugs doing as students in these colleges in the first place? But look at the video first.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I don't know why this space is here, but I can't get rid of it.

This is the fine young man who "allegedly" debauched Maggie Hurt by force. Hard to believe such a thing, if you're a thumb-sucking liberal.

I've searched the web for any news story, other than the video, about Dwayne Fry or Dewayne Frye, or Duane Fry or whatever the spelling is, and can't find anything. I guess it's just not all that newsworthy. You can, however, see his lovely picture on the video. It happened awhile ago, so they've had plenty of time to get it up on the net.

It's very politically incorrect to show pictures of Black perps at the best of times, and I wonder if heads will roll at NBC over this. I mean, showing pictures of the rapists might give people the wrong idea, right?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Feminists simply don't care about rape. They're out to lunch on this one, as they always are. Feminism is about harassing normal, decent guys with all kinds of shrieking about patriarchy and such, and trying to get more lesbians into the math department, and trying to get teenage girls into combat where they can get raped, and above all, enforcing "diversity" anywhere and everywhere. Feminism is to women what communism is to factory workers.

Art and Fascism, Yadda Yadda Yadda

A new tempest in the liberal/neocon teapot. It's very hard these days to keep from being labeled "Fascist," or "Racist." Remember the flap between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood? Lee wanted Eastwood to show Black troops fighting on Iwo Jima, when in fact they only had support functions at the time. Eastwood should have distorted history to satisfy the liberal yearning for Political Correctness.

In other art besides movies, Raising the Flag at Ground Zero, a photograph on which a statue was to be based, was unfortunately a picture of three White guys, so that couldn't happen, and HERE'S part of the story.

Well, the latest atrocity comes from those grubby Russians, who haven't learned to be ashamed of being White yet. They're reverting to fascism, of course, which all White people do when they're not micromanaged by the anointed liberal élite. An account of their atrocious behavior HERE.

An attempt at a venn diagram

Okay, conservatives are reasonable people, the ones who don't overlap with liberals to become Neocons, that is. They think that if it's not broke, you shouldn't fix it. They also think that there's a certain amount of common sense in, all things being equal, deferring to tradition over whacky new ideas. They like traditional morality, because it works for the most part and doesn't result in hordes of illegitimate, ignorant, violent kids, and gives everybody a rough-and-ready guide to behavior. Liberals are the opposite, liking to mess with things that are working just fine until they develop flaws (at which point they abandon them, and look for something new to screw up), they certainly don't like traditional morality, because it's no fun, and it's a lot of fun to elevate their own make-it-up-as-you-go-along morality over the morality of the old fuddy-duddies, and consider themselves, oddly enough, superior to people who actually are moral. In contrast to both, libertarians like to think in terms of principle first, and especially in their Randian incarnation, sometimes subordinate common sense and survival to principle, because they can't force either into their 'rights of man' paradigm.

And these groups can and do overlap. Neocons have respect for tradition, but unfortunately it's not the tradition most of us know about, but rather the tradition of Leon Trotsky. I show them as an overlap of liberalism with conservatism, which is somewhat unfair to conservatives, because the actual conservative principles are at best only given lip service by the Neocons, and at worst twisted into somehow supporting liberal ideas. That is, liberalism is at base, in its American form, a sort of watering-down of Marxism, and that fits right in with the permanent revolution and universal democracy meme of the Neocons, which they got straight from Trotsky, who was too flaky even for Stalin.

Libertarians and liberals overlap to produce what I call "Flaky Libertarians." They have the basic right of man notions that libertarians do, and also the dedication to principles over tradition, those principles basically being sort of anarchistic, which I can sympathize with. The flaky part comes when they mix up the right to do things with the desirability of doing things. This attitude also manifests as confusing tolerance with approval. Like, an orthodox libertarian thinks people must have the right to perform homosexual behavior, talk dirty, commit suicide, get tattoos, or play the bagpipe on their own property. Unfortunately, when this attitude overlaps with liberalism, it turns into the requirement that one approve all those things. Liberals, you see, approve of all that stuff, not out of principle, but because they hate tradition, especially the tradition of Western Civilization, and their stuffy old parents, of course, and see all this stuff as helping to bring all that down. So some libertarians make that mistake as well.

Another overlap is conservatism and libertarianism, which is where I find myself. That's where libertarianism pretty much was in the past, before it got its name. I can fit such people as Mencken, Jefferson, Bastiat, and indeed, most of the Founding Fathers and many of the Founding Fathers of the Confederacy. Essentially, this overlap group accepts the libertarian critique of things, but couples that with the practicality, common sense, and traditionalism of the conservatives, taking the best from both.

Finally, right in the middle, you have the Utter Damn Fools, who take the worst of all these kinds of thinking, and usually end up as authoritarians of one sort or another. Here you'd put politicians who are for lots of niggling laws to make everybody behave the way they ought to, tolerance for deviant, self-destructive behavior mandated by still other laws, a tendency to enforce laws unevenly and haphazardly (what Sam Francis called 'Anarcho-tyranny), and finally, for open borders to help bollix everything else up. Our current leadership in government, media, and entertainment is distributed between Neocons and Utter Damn Fools.

Late Breaking News:  I have modified the Venn Diagram slightly so that it can be used on T-shirts and other items.  Read about that and see the new version HERE.

This all came to mind when I read the current Steve Sailer post, which pretty much validates my contention that the best place to be is up there in that green overlap. His post is HERE.

Raising Taxes to Raise Revenue

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

If 100 people in your town wear derbies, and the mayor decides to raise revenue by imposing a $100 tax on all derby-wearers, the town will raise ten thousand dollars in taxes, right? Well, that's the logic used by the deep thinkers determining tax policy, who assume the suckers will go right on wearing derbies. In the real world, though, as soon as the tax is announced, derbies will be replaces before you know it by fedoras, berets, baseball caps, fezzes, and tam o'shanters. That's an extreme, silly picture, but the reality is pretty much the same. If you increase the tax rate on any kind of activity — capital gains, airplane trips, ammunition, refined sugar, smoking, whatever — you automatically discourage, and therefore get less of, that behavior, whatever it may be. Consequently, when the Gvt decides it can get more money that way, it never gets as much more as it thinks it will, and sometimes, apparently paradoxically, it ends up with less revenue than it was getting before. At first glance, that seems impossible, but Tom Sowell explains HERE.

What's a liberal (media) to do?

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

Remember the delightful TEXAS GANG RAPE story? The news broke that a 11-year old Hispanic girl had been gang-raped in Cleveland, Texas. Well, the media were entranced. What a wonderful opportunity to drive it home that men are no damn good, going around raping little girls, and especially a bunch of neanderthal Texas White rednecks! So they went on and on about it, till they learned a little more about the situation, and the rapists turned out to be Black. Well, that was very confusing — women can do no wrong, Hispanics can do no wrong, and, most especially, Blacks can do no wrong. They flailed around, trying to find a reason to blame Whitey, and ended up getting all snarky, saying everything but that the girl was "asking for it."

Now, with the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case (see yesterday's post for the outrage) they have another dilemma. At first glance, a big shot rich guy has raped a maid, so of course he's bad and the maid is good. But look a little deeper, and you find out that he's a big shot socialist rich guy, you know, like George Soros, so he can't be guilty. But, wait. The maid, it turns out, is not only Black, but an immigrant from Africa, therefore a blameless victim — you know, like Barack Senior. And it's also circulating that she's a Muslim. And, Muslims the world over are all blameless victims, except for Palestinians in Palestine, who are evil savages. So, media-wise, it looks bad for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, despite his liberal credentials. But life is hard for a liberal journalist, because it now is revealed that the perp is not only French (the French are to be admired because of their alleged contempt for stuffy old Anglo-Saxon sexual moral rectitude), but also Jewish, and that's another group that can do no wrong. So of course the usual suspects are lurching out in defense of him. A summary of this from the Daily Beast.

I'm keeping a close eye on Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz. I'm sure they can find a way to blame Whitey in general, and Sarah Palin in particular, for it all.

Where's the outrage? Oh, here it is....

Dominique Strauss....

Shocking things!

One shock after another today! First, Arnie shows himself to be a true politician in the Clinton/Kennedy/Gore mold, then the great Elder of the IMF tries to rape a hotel maid, and worst of all, we find out that Quadafi's mercenaries from Sub-Saharan Africa are actually gang-raping women in Libya. Can you imagine? After all the raping the armies of Africa have been doing over the last several years in the Congo and other places, you'd think they'd have grown out of it by now, wouldn't you? The talking heads on TV were certainly shocked. In the tradition of North Africa,

I'm shocked, shocked!

More on Jared Taylor's Book

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

Jared Taylor's book, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, which I alluded to earlier HERE, is now making the rounds. I haven't got hold of it myself yet, but I know enough about Taylor to tell you that his work is always rational and dispassionate. He's been disputing the meme that racial diversity is a good thing for many years. It's not, you know. Everywhere in the world, it's obvious to the unindoctrinated observer that diversity is always a source of conflict, distrust, and a general breakdown of society. The 'strength' diversity is supposed to add is always described in vague, abstract terms, and, upon close examination, always ends up being something about a wide choice of restaurants. To avoid civil war, I'd gladly give up the availability of exotic cuisines — wouldn't you? I'm way too fat anyway.

In any case, the unique Fred Reed, a dependably sensible fellow, has read the book, and finds nothing objectionable in it, and quite a bit of food for thought. It's rare these days to encounter a thinker who writes about how things actually are. Most think about how things ought to be, in their opinion, and then twists some facts and ignores others till he manages to mke his made-up reality congruent with his vision of oughtabe. Fred doesn't do that. You can tell from his stuff that he (like me) would be much happier if reality was compatible with the utopian vision of liberalism, but he knows that wishing doesn't make it so. His review HERE.

An Epiphany of Political Understanding

Cartoon reprinted by permission of baloocartoons.com

Now I understand the liberals and neocons. Look HERE.

Feminism and Rape

There's a mantra that's been around for decades, that I just came across at two different places on the net in quick succession yesterday. It is: "Rape is about power.' It's usually coupled with some kind of blather about it not having any kind of sexual nature. Like most feminist claptrap, it is either dead wrong or misleading. In this case, it's misleading to say rape is about power, and dead wrong to say it's unrelated to sexuality. The latter point is, or should be, obviously wrong to anybody with two brain cells to rub together — it's akin to saying that bank robbery is unrelated to money.

As for the first part, it's trivially true that rape is about power, because all aggressive acts are about power. That's part of the definition of 'aggressive.' Murder, rape, robbery, shoplifting, fraud, mugging, etc., all criminal acts of aggression are of course about power, inasmuch as the perpetrator is exercising power, or trying to, over the victim. Think — what kind of crime can you think of (other than the usual victimless crimes) that doesn't involve the criminal wielding power over the victim?

So why is it that this mantra is constantly repeated? What good does it do, and what point is the repeater trying to make? Does it make rape sound worse? Hardly. Rape is an extremely evil crime, and saying it's 'only about power' makes it sound less serious, if anything. Could it be that the element of feminism that wants human sexuality trivialized and turned into something casual and meaningless wants to separate rape from sex altogether, so as to keep their cozy little vision of sex as nothing much at all, just a recreational thing, valid? Could it be part of their attempt to make normal male assertiveness into a species of rape, while ignoring the horror of actual rape? Feminists tend to ignore actual cases of rape. I blogged about that earlier HERE. Their actual goal is to harass normal men and accuse them of all kinds of horrible things for acting naturally, while leaving rapists alone for somebody else to deal with.

A former feminist tells her story about how feminist ideology has led to outrageous abuses HERE. Read that, and then read OneSTDV's reaction to it HERE. (This link temporarily broken.)

Finally, what do I think of rape, and rapists? I think women should be allowed and encouraged to defend themselves against rapists. Not with candle-light vigils, or little bottles that squirt nasty-smelling stuff, or with Jedette mind-tricks, but with guns. Now, organized feminists are totally against that. To paraphrase L. Neil Smith, they'd rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than to see her with a gun in her hand. Next time you're talking to a ditzy feminist who favors gun control, ask her if that's her preference, too.

A view of Obama from the Left

All we fanatic right-wingers have had it up to here with Obama, and if you listen to the cheerleaders like Chris Matthews et al on the "News," you'd think we were in the minority. No. Obama is roundly despised by the right, the moderates, and, not surprisingly to anybody who's really paying attention, to the authentic left. Ted Rall, with whom I seldom agree but whom I always respect, gives his opinon of Obama HERE.

Richard Wagner

One of my favorite pieces from my favorite composer — Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A lot more follows, if you want to keep listening.

Our risible immigration policy

It's bad enough that our government ignores the presence of illegal aliens, and seems to prefer handing visas out to the most inappropriate immigrants possible, based on things like 'refugee' status. And this, remember, is at a time when we have huge unemployment — what better way to fix that than to increase the labor surplus even more? Well, that's good for the big employers who are special contributors to politicians. Well, that's not enough. We also have an immigration lottery that foreigners can enter, and gain admission for no particular reason other than the fact that they want to and happen to win a casting of lots. That's enough to make the rest of the world laugh, and laugh hard, at us. No matter how self-destructive you might think our immigration policy is, you're probably underestimating it. An article on the immigration lottery HERE.