Libertarian types

This originally comes from http://www.leftycartoons.com/ but I found it over at http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/  (click on it to see it full-size)  And I think it's worth reacting to.

Naive.  Can't argue with this one.  A great many libertarians are exactly this way, because they fall into the basic error of believing that all people and culture are exactly the same, and that therefore everybody will act 'sensibly,' i. e., the way the Naive guy would act.  In practice, eliminating government in almost every case would result in the immediate formation of one on more new governments, usually worse than the eliminated one.

Petulant.  Sure.  We all know this guy.  He's just a poseur, and has no actual plans or desires to actually improve anything, just to show off.

Too Smart for Science.  This one is pretty much bogus, as there are heaps of people all over the political spectrum who doubt, with good reason, the motives of the Global Warming aficionados.  I do, and a lot of scientists of all political persuasions do, too.

Arrogant.  I run into this one all the time.  Most all the evidence they site I'm already familiar with, and am also familiar with evidence on the other side.  Another poseur.  No intention to actually convince anybody, just a show-off.  It's a Randian virus.

Left-Wing.  This guy doesn't belong in any movement calling itself 'libertarian.'  He should join the Democratic party, where he belongs.  Far too many of him on the net.

Denial-ican.  Bogus.  I'm no Republican, but I've never voted for a Democrat.  I'm a lesser-of-two-evils guy, and so are a big plurality of Americans.  I'm supposed to prove I'm not a Republican by voting for Obama?  False dichotomy.

More Libertarian than Thou.  This guy is everywhere, and considers pragmatism some kind of evil thing.  He ensures that libertarian ideas are going to be considered ridiculous by everybody else.

Terrified.  This type is real, but not absurd as he's pictured here.  Anybody who isn't afraid of the Government is living in a fool's paradise.

Too Much Heinlein.  This type isn't real, or he's somebody who doesn't really understand Heinlein.  The inequality of man is simply a fact, and I can't see anything in Heinlein that says that poor people aren't smart.  Straw man.

The Island.  Sure.  A lot of us feel that way, and the fact that we try to get some of our productivity back by using taxpayer-provided services is hardly hypocritical.  Any other attitude is self-defeating.

Creepy.  Yeah, there are a few of these.  Again, they should be Democrats.

Selectively Frugal.  I suppose there are some like this, but as most libertarians seem to be among the lower income classes, you'll find a lot more of this guy with the Republicans and Democrats.  Never mind the tax cut.  The ones who want bailouts are the worst.

Nepotist.  I see a lot more of this guy among neocons, I'm afraid.  I don't know any actual libertarians who would say this.  Most would say that a lot of success is also from non-merit sources.

The Apostle.  Some young idealists are indeed like this, but any libertarian with experience knows that there's no magic to the market, just a comparative lack of obstacles to most worthwhile enterprise, and that there's more to life than the market.

Atlas.  A real type, but you also find him in every other political movement.  Every other.

Consistent.  This is misleading.  Libertarians want low or no taxes because they think the money taken is either wasted or used in counterproductive ways.  Also, many question the legitimacy of the power to tax, which is at least debatable.

The Historian.  True.  He's real, but I can show you the same type everywhere, again, who will tell you that Jefferson agrees with Marx, Mao, Jesse Jackson, Mussolini, Barney Frank, whoever.  Hardly an exclusive libertarian type.

Gunner Joe.  Real, but this is a caricature.  All libertarians think that people should have the right of self-defense, and that people who refuse to defend themselves are indeed a little sheeplike.

Bizarrely Hypocritical.  Nope.  Most libertarians are fanatically pro-abortion.  The ones who aren't, oppose it because they believe the unborn have the right to not be murdered.  You can argue with that position, but they certainly don't take it because they want to increase Governement power.

Briefly Tempting.  Not sure what is meant here, except to say that certain libertarian tropes are attractive.  Is the cartoonist saying that the war on drugs isn't ridiculous?  That police abuse should continue?  That war is good?

Whitey.  This is also a caricature.  Libertarians also believe that restaurants have the right to refuse service to Whites, Hindus, bald-headed guys, or anybody else.  This is just making fun of the principle that you should be able to do anything non-aggressive with your own property, instead of having a bureaucrat or politician tell you what you can and can't and must do.  Makes sense to me.

Missionary.  Ah, the Randites.  They are indeed real, and make the mistake of thinking Rand covered everything.  She didn't.  She got a lot of things right, some wrong, and ignored some other things.  You can't find a complete guide to life in Rand, any more than you can in Newton, Goethe, or Terry Pratchett, tho the latter comes close.  Thing is, anybody who tells you he can guide your whole life isn't a political philospher, but a religious prophet.  From time to time, Rand got those two things mixed up.

Caveat Emptor.  This has validity, but it leaves out the libertarian notion that a lot of Government functions like this can be performed, not by individuals, but by private businesses that make it their purpose to inform the public.  Newspapers, for example, and the AMA for another.

Stoned.  I have to admit I know a few.  They're the infantile libertarians, who think freedom is all about stuffing beans up your nose.  Of course, they also inhabit the Democrats and Republicans, as childishness is universal.

Assimilating Immigrants

Even politicians with a halfway realistic understanding of the immigration crisis, like Tom Tancredo, tend to make the idiotic statement that they don't oppose immigration, just illegal immigration.  That's a very stupid thing to say, because that's giving away the store to the immigration treason lobby, who only need to say, then, that all we have to do is legalize all immigration.  Because if only illegal immigration is bad, the solution is to legalize it.  So, no.  I think we should have very little immigration, and we certainly shouldn't allow people to immigrate who don't want to be Americans.  A lot of them don't, you know.  Oh, they want to be here, and have the bennies of residents, and the even better bennies of citizenship, but they don't want to be Americans.  They want to continue to be Mexicans or Israelis or Armenians or Chinese or whatever.  Now, for the most part, earlier immigrants weren't welcomes unless they made the commitment to become American, and stop being German, or Irish or whatever.  And they ones who didn't like it tended to go back home where they belonged.

Pat Buchanan tells us about a whole lot of people who want to live here and get all the goodies, but to continue to be Mexicans in every sense, which includes being anti-American, here:
http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan173.html

And Steve Sailer tells us about criminals who have been welcomed as immigrants who steal stuff, and then go back to Armenia or wherever till the heat dies down, and then maybe come back to steal more stuff, here:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/06/lack-of-extradition-treaties.html

Why is it always Hitler?

In my last post, I pointed out that nobody much wants to mention Mencken, but it's different with Hitler.  Everybody wants to mention Hitler.  Nobody called Saddam Hussein a Mao.  He was Hitler.  Khomeini was Hitler, too, not a Pol Pot or a Napoleon. Right now I guess Kadhafi is Hitler, not Torquemada or Genghis Khan or even Mussolini.  Hitler.  Domestically, even our Presidents are Hitler, when they're not being Jefferson Davis — but sometimes they're both, of course.  Do a google image search on
Bush Hitler
and see what you get.  Some overenthusiastic neocons have even called Obama Hitler.  That's not fair to either one of them.  Obama's more of a Juan Peron.  No, that's not fair, either.  Historical figures as incompetent as Obama just don't often make it into our collective memory.
Anyhow, read more about the "Everybody is Hitler" phenomenon over at TAKIMAG.

Henry Louis Mencken

H. L. Mencken is too hot to handle these days.  He just won't fit into any of the available ideological boxes right now.  He was very anti-government, but too connected to reality to be an anarchist.  And though he considered government an evil, he was far too politically incorrect to fit into the usual libertarian pattern.  Interestingly, he opposed both World Wars, and of course was absolutely correct in both cases.  He's reviled now as an anti-Semitic racist, which is fascinating, because he expended a lot more ink criticizing my own Scotch-Irish ethnic group as a bunch of ignorant yahoos than he did being critical of any other group.  He was opposed to religion, but also opposed to the usual Marxist, Freudian, etc. ideologies that tend to go along with atheism.  He was very much pro-German, for the best of reasons, and stuck to his guns on that subject no matter how much it hurt his career.  He was a supporter of science and a skeptic of all political movements, roundly despising most of the politicians of his time.

He had a stroke in 1948, and thereafter was unable to read or write, and could barely speak.  Some might theorize that God did this so Mencken would be unable to criticize the new country of Israel. Paul Gottfried has more to say about the Sage of Baltimore HERE.

The Lying Luo Liar and His Lying Little Lackeys

Cartoon by BALOO

All you Obama supporters must be very proud.  The deficit has been reduced, we've stopped borrowing Chinese money to pay for freebies, we're all back to work again, earning big money, and the wars are over.  Even the war in Libya that isn't a war.

Let's see, it was "Bush lied, people died."  How about "Obama prevaricated, people liquidated"?  Or, "Obama jived, the economy dived"?

In any case, Bush's lie seemed to be about the justification for his wars, and is that better or worse than Obama lying about the fact of his wars?  Beats me, but it seems nice in retrospect that Bush at least admitted that there were a couple of wars, instead of Obama's routine, but maybe that's just me again.  It's hard to cheer for an imaginary war, even as you watch the body bags coming back.  When you already don't have two wars going on, it's less threatening, I guess, to start another war that doesn't exist either.  Charles Glass offers a more detailed description of this Obama Doctrine HERE.

Apocalypto Now!

Did you know that we had an illegal alien problem back in the Fifties?  And do you know how it was fixed? In those day, you see, there wasn't much political correctness, and although Eisenhower isn't thought of as a champion of conservatism, the notion of border security in those days was considered perfectly sensible by conservatives and liberals.  Hard to believe, I know, because today all the liberals want the border totally open with absolutely no enforcement of immigration law, and the neocons, as usual, are just a subset of liberals, and feel exactly the same way.  Well, to mke a long story short, Eisenhower initiated "Operation Wetback," and deported the illegals.  What a concept!

Now, of course, any talk about making illegals leave is denounced as racist, nativist, fascist, and probably homophobic.  We are constantly harangued by the immigration enthusiasts — liberals, neocons, and far too many libertarians, who should know better — that illegal immigrants are great for the economy (what they said about slaves in the old days), which is not true, that they pay their own way with the taxes they pay, also not true, and that they readily assimilate, which is, of course, true of some of them but not at all true for most.

Steve Sailer, over at VDare, discusses immigration, soccer games, and the motivation of the immigration enthusiasts HERE.

What's the matter with everybody?

What's the matter with everybody?  Let's take it one at a time.  Start with Europe.  Europe has lost its identity.  WWII was a struggle about identity, after all.  With the ultra-identity guys in the axis fighting the moderate-identity guys of the allies.  Well, the UI's were wiped out, and the MI guys won, but killed off a good portion of themselves winning.  Then the brainwashers got to work, removing every shred of pride in being European from the defeated Axis powers, and having done that, and perfected their techniques, they moved on to brainwashing the winners, teaching the Brits and French and Americans that if they retained any pride in being European, or Western, or Christian, or White — well, that would be no better than being Nazis.  It seems to have worked. Right now, according to the Telegraph, the Brits are so busy screwing around in the Middle East, defending other people's countries and borders, that if the Argentines decided to take another crack at grabbing the Falklands, the Brits wouldn't be able to do a damn thing to stop them.  Which is, I guess, according to plan.  The plan being to demoralize and weaken the West so much that it will no longer be able to defend itself and then it'll all be over.

Are we as far gone as the Brits?  I mean, we're all tangled up in the same places — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen (how's that anti-war thing working out for you, Obama voters?) — but we still have a pretty powerful armed force left over, surely plenty to keep, say, Latin Americans from swarming in here illegally, right?  Oh... right.  Well, we could stop them if Obama and Congress and the courts wanted to stop them.  I guess.  It's moot.  Forget I asked.

Obama is now a pejorative

The term "Obama" is now a pejorative.  Or embarrassing.  Or something.  In Japan, of course.  Read about the reprehensible behavior of little Japanese kids HERE.

Scott Adams, Feminists, Rape, and the Whole Ball of Wax

Most people do very few worthwhile things, most of us just doing enough that we feel like we're a net contributor to society, and of course there's a large contingent of drones, freeloaders, and thieves who take pride in not doing worthwhile things, but in doing detrimental, selfish things.  And then you have the Da Vincis, who don't stop with doing one great thing, but go on to do a lot of other great things.  One of these Da Vincis is Scott Adams of Dilbert.  He does one of the hottest, cleverest comic strips around, and most of us would be satisfied with that, and spend the rest of our time golfing or playing video games or hanging around bars.  But Scott Adams is also a philosopher, a job title many claim but few deserve. Indeed, some of our best philosophers these days, like Scott Adams and Tom Sowell and Steven Pinker never call themselves philosophers, but that's what they are.  You can tell that Adams is a philosopher just from the comic strip, but if you have any doubts, his blog will clear them up.  I read it all the time.  The current kerfluffle there concerns a previous post where he riffed on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case and went on to discuss the male sex drive, rape, and how society treats men and women differently.  At first glace, that last sentence would seem to describe a conventional bellyaching about women's disadvantages in a male-dominated society, the like of which we're constantly treated to by pouting feminists throughout MAG (media, academia, government).  But, oh, no.  Au contraire, Scott (I hope I can call him Scott) makes tough feminists cry with this particular post, examining, as he often does, human society from almost a Martian point of view, questioning all the assumptions about such things — or, rather, basically ignoring them — in favor of observation and reason, two tools which feminism notably lacks.  You can get to the whole glorious fire drill HERE.

Neanderthals Among Us

Cartoon by BALOO

Well, it seems to be generally accepted now that if you're not purely of sub-Saharan African ancestry, you're part Neanderthal.  Seems that our Cro-Magnon ancestors didn't wipe them all out after all, but interbred with them.  For a time, I believe it was accepted that Neanderthals were a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis, but now many believe Neanderthals are a subspecies, or race, to be called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. To some extent, such divisions are arbitrary.  At any rate, nonAfricans do indeed have Neanderthal DNA, naturally in different proportions.  A summary of these new discoveries, some nice illustrations, and a discussion of their possible implications can be found HERE.

Admirable Japan

I'm neither a xenophobe nor a xenophile.  I admit to two things:  a slight knee-jerk suspicion of the unfamiliar, and a slight knee-jerk attraction toward the unfamiliar.  I believe they cancel each other out. I have a basic Western Civilization

orientation, of course, and I judge non-Western things through that lens.  Everybody judges through the lens of their own culture, and anybody who claims not to do so is very naive or very phony.  I find a lot of foreign things repugnant and a lot of foreign things admirable.  (Note:  this isn't about immigration.  When judging the desirability of immigrants, you also have to consider compatability, no matter how admirable the immigrants might be otherwise.) As far as non-Western countries go, the only one I know much about that is in sum considerably more admirable than repugnant is Japan.  One of the most recent

 manifestations of their admirability is their completely rational and civilized response to their tsunami.  Everybody evidently expected them to behave like New Orleans types and loot and riot, but they behaved like Japanese instead, to their credit.  Oh, their are a lot of wonderful things about them — their work ethic, their art, their sense of harmony and cooperation, etc.  Colin Liddell has made a list of ten good things about Japan HERE.

Discrimination, discrimination, all is discrimination!

"We can do whatever we want, but we can't want what we want."  That quote is from memory, so it might not be exact, but that's what Peter O'Toole said in Lawrence of Arabia, and I expect the real Lawrence said something to that effect, too.  I hope he did, because that explains a lot about humanity.  When some subdivision of the human race is underrepresented somehow, there are three basic factors that might explain it.  Let's say that Slobbovian-Americans are two percent of the population, but only point two percent of American lumberjacks.  Possible causes:

1.  Discrimination.  The old-boy lumberjack network freezes out Slobbovians because of racism or hate or something. (He's a lumberjack and that's not okay.)  This is the usual establishment knee-jerk explanation of anything of this sort.

2. Intrinsic ability.  Slobbovians aren't good at lumberjacking.  This explanation is pretty much taboo,  unless you're explaining why Whites are outnumbered by Blacks in the NBA.  It's perfectly all right to proclaim that Whites as a group are inferior.  So in the world of political discourse, the number one reason is always contrasted to the number two reason, and wins every time.  But it that the whole story?  No.

3. Indifference.  Slobbovians don't like lumberjacking.  This factor is almost never mentioned, which is a pity, because it's often the right explanation.  Especially in cases where the disparity is sexual.  Males and females often have equal abilities, but different preferences.  That's why no matter how much they fiddle around with standards for enlistment, young ladies simply don't want to be soldiers in the same proportion that young men do.

This brings us to the Wal-Mart situation.  Wal-Mart isn't promoting enough women, so according to the Zeitgeist, that means discrimination is taking place.  Is it?  Only if you stretch the definition ridiculously.  Thing is, women do want to be managers at Wal-Mart, insofar as they want the extra money and the prestige, but they don't want to do what Wal-Mart managers have to do to perform the job.  So the "discrimination" is the very job itself.  That is, its requirements are the sort of thing that young men, especially bachelors, often tend to fit very well,  but which women, most especially married women with kids, don't fit at all well.  So in order not to be perceived as discriminating, Wal-Mart would have to change the whole requirement system for managers and either start to lose money, or create a new tier of managers and call them "effectuators" or something, who actually would do the managing jobs, until, of course, it was discovered that the effectuators were disproportionately male, and the cycle will start again.  Steve Sailer elaborates on the situation HERE.

Evolution and/or Intelligent Design

First off, there's a problem with definition.  Some people take the word "evolution" to signify the whole idea that life arose spontaneously from random chemical combination and then evolved into all living things.  And that's certainly a possible scenario, but evolution, that is, the change of species by means of mutation and natural selection, doesn't necessarily include any opinion about the origin of life, just what's happened to it since.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the term "intelligent design" is also subject to different interpretation, from the idea that all was created, and that evolution never happens, to the idea that life was created, and then proceeded to evolve the way it's usually understood to have done. I see it this way:  It's not reasonable to insist that life arose randomly, though it's certainly a possibility.  Likewise, it's not reasonable to insist that life was created by a deity, though that is also a definite possibilty.  But it is reasonable to insist that however life came into being, it has undergone evolution since.  So I place myself in that moderate overlap. No opinions to be expressed here about the origin of life, but a definite acceptance of the mechanism of evolution in its basic sense.
Every now and then, Fred writes something about evolution, and since I consider Fred an oracle on most subjects, it frustrates me that he seems to have a bias against the idea of evolution.  In his essay HERE, he divides us all into those who want and expect an explanation for everything, and those who don't.  Partisans of evolution, of course, go into the first group.  I suppose if there are only two groups, I fit into the first better, because I recognize that a lot of things do have explanations, and things that don't may be explained in the future.  But I definitely don't think that it's inevitable that all things will be explained, and I'd frankly be suspicious of any unified theory of everything.  But, while some things aren't explicable by evolution theory, many things are, and some things people say about evolution and its implications are simply misconceptions.  And there are a couple in Fred's essay.  I'll wait while you read it......
Done?  Good.  Okay,  He starts out:

The theory of evolution does not stand alone. It is part of a vast synthesis which fits all of existence into a coherent whole:The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the chance appearance of life in primeval seas, the evolution of that life, the Pyramids, Space Shuttle, and Renoir. It is an imposing intellectual edifice, mechanistic, easily comprehended, self-assured, with only the details to be worked out. Or so we are told.

Okay, some people see it that way, but I don't.  Though I like the idea of all things being explicable, I'm not sure that they are, and I can imagine accepting evolution theory while being skeptical about a lot of other things.  It's like arithmetic.  That's just one theory, and you don't have to believe in gravity or Freud or any other Theory of How Things Are to be a believer in arithmetic theory.  I think he's reacting here to the unassailable arrogance of a lot of those who accept evolution and use it, and other things, to show how superior they are to those who don't, and who demonstrate an assurance about their opinions that is without basis.

He goes on to point out that evolution doesn't have an explanation for volition and morality.  Of course it doesn't.  Arithmetic doesn't have an explanation for it, either.  At least for the present, evolution doesn't have an explanation for a lot of things.  People are always trying to extend it so that it does, which is what science is all about, and they may never be able to do, so, but that doesn't undermine actual evolution theory, which was first come up to explain the variation is species, which it does admirably.

And then he says:


The other place where evolutionism breaks down is in human reproduction. All through evolutionism runs the idea of maximizing reproduction. Women have big breasts to attract men so that they can make more babies. Men are big and strong so that they can get the women and make more or better babies. People cooperate in bands so they can stay alive and make more babies. On and on.
Yet now we have whole societies which by choice are not having babies. Japan, Italy, Spain, Russia, Germany and so on are breeding at below replacement. In Mexico the birth rate falls like a rock, even though nutrition has improved and health is better. The drop is easily explained in human terms. Why do you, the reader, not want fifteen children? The same answers apply in Mexico. Interestingly, the drop in procreation is steepest among the most intelligent , educated,and wealthy—that is, among those most able to support large families. There is no evolutionary explanation. When I ask, I encounter silence or vague mumblings about how there must be some mutation or, well, something.


This is one of the most common misunderstandings of evolution theory.  Evolutionists who can't answer Fred's question here don't understand evolution themselves.  Humans have certain characteristics that have come into being, evolution-wise, to promote reproduction and survival of the species.  It's almost a tautology.  If the sex drive causes reproduction, it's selected for. Another drive is to care for the children we produce.  Without that, they don't grow up to reproduce. So that's selected for.  These two drives have kept us going for many generations, so they're adaptive.  We also have other drives that keep the individual alive long enough to reproduce.  One drive is to have personal pleasure, which can be obtained by accumulating property, power, and status.  Normally, throughout human history, there's been little conflict.  The more property, power, and status you have, the more likely you are to rear your offspring to reproductive age.  Now, often in evolution you have an adaptation that, without changing itself, becomes maladaptive due to changing environment.  If you've evolved to eat plant A, and plant A dies out, you die out.  So, in the modern world, if you are able to increase your property, power, and status by not having children,  (See the movie Idocracy.) you won't have children.  So the drive to accumulate PPS has become maladaptive.  Evolution is like free-market economics.  Things that work now may not work in the future, and have to be replaced by a new idea that works better. You have to have failure in order to reward success.  So in order for the nations he mentions that are dying out to stop dying out, their environment, which in this case is their PPS drive, has to be changed to elevate reproduction to a higher level.  Parents have to start nagging their children more to produce grandchildren, a social norm that has fallen out of favor.  It is like free-market economics, in that a lot of people think that if a company fails, that proves that capitalism has failed as a system.  The failure is necessary for the system to work.  That's what the system is all about, and it's the same with evolution.

Finally, this Futurama episode expresses perfectly my attitude about evolution. Enjoy!

Oops.  The episode has vanished from the net.  Gone extinct, so to speak.  You can watch a clip from it HERE.

Calvin & Hobbes, the Sequel!

Well, not really.  There are a lot of Calvin & Hobbes parodies out there, many of them very good, but the most charming I've seen so far was done by Tom & Dan. Here's the FIRST ONE.   Then click to then next.  Then go HERE, and then click to the next one.

Black Racism

We have to call it "Black" racism because the default meaning of racism in popular parlance is some kind of bad behavior or thinking among Whites. Indeed, Black racism is almost never officially noticed, and there are academic flakes at work all the time trying to demonstrate that racism on the part of anybody other than Whites is a logical impossibility.  It's interesting to ask people who use the word "racist" just what "racist" means, and they usually can't give you an answer.  So I almost never use the term, and definitely never without defining it.  On the left, especially among professional victimologists, "racism" is just a pejorative used against Whites, with no actual semantic content.  If you try to find actual racism out there, based on words and action instead of telepathy, you'll find that it's overwhelmingly found in the behavior of minorities against Whites these days.  Basically, any behavior or speech by Whites that is considered off the liberal reservation is automatically denounced as racism.  While any anti-White behavior or speech on the part of nonWhites is called "pride," or "self-determination," or some other good-sounding term.
Walter Williams doesn't put up with that kind of sophistry.  He's not some punk kid for whom history started in the Sixties.  He lived through Jim Crow and the whole business.  He talks about Black racism HERE.

Not Enough Black Superheroes

Frankly, I thought there were plenty.  They've even morphed Nick Fury into Samuel Jackson, which makes you wonder about the Howling Commandos and what FDR had in mind.  Just Google "Black superhero" and see what you get. But seriously, nothing is ever enough.  We've been taught by the media that American Blacks are just wonderful cops, of course, great scientists (that guy on Bones), super computer nerds (Samuel Jackson, again, in Jurassic Park), and judges, very good judges, in just about all lawyer dramas since Perry Mason.  And now, when they aren't complaining about the lack of Black role models, they're bending over backwards to create Black role models.  There's even a Black Superhero Blog.

Well, superheroes aren't real anyway, so I suppose I'm beating an unreal horse, but I wouldn't be if there wasn't still the unending fountain of victimology spouting all over the place. The Christian Science Monitor published a piece lamenting that Kryptonians are all Whitey, and OneSTDV reacts to it HERE.

The Great Arizona Baseball Boycott!

Considering the Hispanics I know, they seems to be about like the average American Anglo with regard to illegal immigration. A few are pro-illegal, rather more are anti-, and most don't think about it much.  Indeed, it seems that the only people who are fervently in favor of illegal immigration are the usual professional activists and White liberals.  And, of course, White liberals dominate dominate MAG (media, academia, government), and they're all hot and bothered about cooking up new schemes to humiliate Arizona for having the impudence to take immigration law seriously.  One big boycott plan isn't going very well.  Steve Sailer discusses it HERE.

Self-destructive religion

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not anti-Christian.  Christianity is one of the basic elements of Western Civilization, and without it, Europe may well have fallen to Islam centuries ago, and wouldn't that have been nice?  But churches are made up of people, and people are fallible, as Christianity itself teaches us.  I find it hard to believe that the Christian principle of self-sacrifice was intended to extend to suicidal self-destruction, or that the Brotherhood of Man is meant to  trump self-defense or any other measures we must take to ensure our own existence and that of our families.  Sure, it's been interpreted that way, over and over again, and sometimes from within the church.  That's what leads missionaries to risk their own lives and that of their friends and relatives to convert others. I've always thought that sort of thing had limited utility, anyway, and that converts should be attracted by example, not by proselytization.  I think that's the case with all belief systems, or should be.

The first duty of Christendom is to preserve itself, whether by self-defense or conversion or a combination. It's psychotic to take Christian tolerance to the extreme of helping other people destroy Christianity.  Like the egregious Archbishop of Canterbury, who advocates submission to sharia law.  If you don't believe it, HERE it is.

Well, it's happening here in the United States.  Suicidal church groups are beating the drum to bring in all sorts of Third World people, sometimes in the hope that they can convert them and make good Christians out of them (they can't, sorry), and sometimes just out of the crazy idea that they should basically destroy the country in order to give goodies away to other people.  A recent example of this is the Southern Baptist Convention, which just voted (it was close) to give amnesty to illegal aliens.  Now, of course they said, like all politicians do, that it's not amnesty, but a 'path to citizenship,' but by now we all know that it's a distinction without a difference.    If you're a Southern Baptist, maybe you should stop filling the collection plate till the church reverses itself.  And that goes for other churches, too.  It is your church, after all.

The Sovereign South

Reconstruction is still going on.  One thing that we're all constantly taught by the MAG (media, academia, government) is that the South, the CSA, all things Southern, are intrinsically bad. The only historical personage who has largely avoided the label is Robert E. Lee, who is sort of the Rommel of the Civil War, and may be esteemed largely because he's famous for surrendering.  Any Southern politician who is not a flaming liberal of the Carter/Clinton stripe is considered a troglodyte of some kind.  It doesn't let up.  It has to do, of course, with slavery and the civil rights movement.  Slavery lasted longest in the South, and therefore the whole responsibility for its evils is placed on the South, despite the fact that there were plenty of anti-slavery Southerners and pro-slavery Northerners.  And despite the fact that just about everybody participated in slavery, directly or indirectly, because of economic pressure to do so, before the Civil War, until it became economically unviable.  And please don't forget that slavery had been abolished throughout Western Civilization for centuries until it was reintroduced from Africa.  That's right.  We in the West had stopped practicing it while it flourished in Africa and the Islamic world.  Of course, it's still being practiced in Africa, but that's all right, because it's not being done by White people, and when nonWhites practice slavery, it's nicer somehow.  You know, like Obama's Muslim ancestors.

So. The MAG says that Southern heritage is bad, Southern (White) people are bad, and the only acceptable activities for Southern White people are paying taxes and apologizing. Of course, all American White people also have to pay taxes and apologize,  because it took them so long to get around to destroying the South.  And Hitler.

Well, I don't think so.  I think Southern heritage is a good thing, and Southern culture is in sum a very important and valuable element of Western Civilization.  So does Sir Tristram, and his analysis is HERE.

Conspriacy Theory?

Cartoon by BALOO

Actual conspiracy theories usually hinge on the notion that a group of people meet in secret, unofficially, without public knowledge, and pretend not to be working together or, sometimes, even to know each other.  But what do you call it when none of that is the case?  Here's something about the Bilderbergers.

Chris Matthews is such a tool

Cartoon by Baloo.  Buy it on merchandise HERE.

I just watched Chris Matthews — it's like a train wreck, you can't help watching in horror — and he was doing the usual sycophancy of Obama which almost reaches homoerotic levels.  Brrr.  He ran a clip of Newt Gingrich at the debates, saying:

“This is the core of my argument with Barack Obama,” Gingrich said. “He is a natural secular European socialist. He believes in big government. He believes in centralized power. He believes he, as a politician, knows more than we do and he should help us redesign our lives by letting him and other bureaucrats live it for us. It is the opposite of freedom.”

Now, Gingrich is a twerp in many respects, and believes in a lot of dopey things along with some sensible things, but he is brainy and articulate, and I haven't heard a better summary of Obama's beliefs from any of the other candidates.  Maybe some of them could do as well, but they haven't to my knowledge, because they have a visceral fear of seeming to pick on Sidney Poitier Morgan Freeman Gus Guster Barack Obama, the first Black President, if not the first foreign President and the first President who's never had an actual job. Now, the interesting thing is that Matthews reacted as though Gingrich had said something that made no sense at all.  Not an exaggeration, mind you, but something totally without basis in truth.  And, as I said, it's just about a perfect description of him.

So if you forget just how insane and/or dishonest liberals are, tune in to Hardball, and remind yourself.

Weiner's Rabbi

What kind of Rabbi would a guy like Weiner follow? The Jewish equivalent of Reverend Wright, it would appear.  The story is in the New York Daily News. Interestingly, Eric Cantor is also involved with the same Rabbi.  My prediction, by the way, is that the Republican ticket will be Romney/Cantor.  Plus ça change, plus c'est le same old same old.

Ayn Rand on money

I have mixed feelings about Ayn Rand.  In some respects she was a bit of a ditz, with some weird notions about sex and pop culture, and her philosophy failed to include a lot of obvious things about human nature, politics, religion, and culture.  She was a bit narrow about such matters, and surrounded as she was by sycophants, she kind of forgot the distinction between her opinions and her taste.  Makes it hard to appreciate the fact that some things she got dead right.  And one of those things is the nature of money.  Here's a lo-o-ong quote from her on money, or the love of it, being the root of all evil.  Reads like a Steve Ditko comic, as well it should.  It's on the Libertarians For Freedom site.

Scott Adams on Psychic Politics

It's hard to classify Scott Adams.  A lot of people assume that he's a liberal, being a comic strip cartoonist and all, who are notoriously on the left, and there are certainly a lot of criticisms of the business world in Dilbert.  But he's not that simple.  He has a skeptical attitude about things in general, and recently he mused about how so many in the commentariat seem to be able to psychically detect all the inner motives of their ideological opponents.  Being Scott Adams, he says it all very cleverly HERE.

Stephen Jay Gould yet again

A few posts back, I pointed out that Stephen Jay Gould has been outed as a charlatan and phony scientist who fudged data and lied in support of his Marxist ideology.  I pointed out that the real work in anthropology is being done these days by evolutionary psychologists such as Dr. Kevin MacDonald.

Well, as luck would have it, unsurprisingly, Dr. MacDonald has himself commented on the debunking of Gould, and also points out that this will make no difference whatsoever to the intellectual elite, whose dedication to leftist nonsense will continue without a ripple.  Dr. MacDonald discusses this HERE.

Education these days

I've always been big on education, in the sense that kids should be taught stuff — not indoctrinated, but actually taught things.  And there's always a story in the news about how ignorant high school and college students are about history.  I agree.  Kids and people in general don't know any history these days, but I'm dubious about whether the schools should teach all that much of it.  When they do teach it these days, it seems more an exercise in left-wing propaganda than actual history.  The teachers themselves being rather ignorant and PC-whipped, their idea of history seems to be, basically, Martin Luther King.  Just ask a schoolkid of any age about MLK, and I guarantee he "knows" all kinds of things about him.  But ask him about Edison, or General Grant, or Andy Jackson, and you just about always draw a blank.

I've decided that the schools ought to teach what was long considered the basics.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic.  Things have changed a bit, so I'd include typing (now usually called "keyboarding") as a part of writing.  If a kid can read, he can find out anything else he decides he needs to know.  If he learns basic arithmetic, he can figure out things about money, economics, etc., that he needs to know to function.  And writing he needs to tell other people what he knows.  Everything else is optional.  I've long thought that official education should taper off at about puberty.  If you don't know the 3 R's by then, you probably never will.

Schools, all the way from pre-school to post-gratuate, have pretty much become a jobs program for educators.  Most high school is useless, just designed to be that jobs program, and also to keep kids out of the workforce as long as possible and therefore ignorant of the real world.  People like that are very manageable, you see.  And if you can keep them in school till they're thirty or so, you can indoctrinate the bejeezus out of them so they'll vote right.  And if most high school is useless, that goes double for college.  College used to be for professionals, and now such students are a small minority, and most are just there in a sort of playgroup mode, learning very little except how to regurgitate trendy slogans, and extending their childhood as far as they can.

Never forget the economic incentives in all of this.  Responding to an earlier post, Karol Ross said:

"...the real bottom line the government has set; if you don't get a college degree in (something like hotel management) you can't get a job, but that means you have to spend lots of money getting the same training that was not only free in decades past, but they paid YOU while you were getting it. The gov. has set up a system that means you have to borrow money from them at a sum so large you will be paying it the rest of your life, because there is no job in the market where you hold your degree that will pay you the salary you need to settle the loan, if you can get a job at all, because they give no guarantees. And worse, they have taken all of the job experience apprenticeships out of high schools now for those who know they are not academics, and just want to get into a profession; so now mom and dad, or the student, still must go out and get a gov. loan to cover what was a profession a kid used to be able to begin right out of high school decades ago. Worked for America, the population, and the economy, but obviously didn't give the gov. a share in the bounty. Government control? We have been slipping into the vise for a long time, but no one seems to be angry enough to set up apprenticeship programs; and if they did would a gov. regulator come in and shut them down?"

That's hard to argue with. Especially the part about how one used to learn to do jobs by doing them.  Back in my day, the 'student loan' scam was new, and I didn't want anything to do with it.  The idea of going into debt to learn about Renaissance Poetry and Global Warming seemed a little, shall we say, irresponsible?

One STDV has a take on all this HERE.

New Ken Burns Project!

This is great news for fans of Ken Burns and fans of comic strips.  Here's a preview.  Check it out!

Alien invasion?

What's the difference between invasion and immigration?  That's a tough one. Generally, when Spain created an empire in the New World, it's described as an invasion.  But when the Brits developed the 13 colonies, we think of it as immigration.  But basically the same things happened.  Probably the Spanish are recognized as invaders because they clearly attacked actual countries and brought the governments down, in Mexico and Peru.  But the native cultures confronted by the Spanish and the British were all destroyed, or modified so much as to amount to destruction.  In both cases, while there was resistance on the part of the Indians, there were elements of the Indians that welcomed and cooperated with the invaders/immigrants.  In the case of Mexico, at least, some Indian tribes despised the Aztecs so much they thought they'd be better off with the Spanish.  Who's to say they were wrong?

I think it's fair to say that the difference between immigration and invasion is much like the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists.  If you approve of what's going on, you call it "immigration," and if you don't, you call it "invasion."

Right now, the West is being invaded by non-Westerners, and the elite formers of opinion all across the spectrum chooses to call it immigration, and fall all over themselves insisting that it's not detrimental at all, but actually beneficial for us.  The US is being invaded largely by Latin Americans, who are prized for their ability to work cheap and become dependent on Government handouts, thereby benefitting the Government, by making it still more important, and their employers, who get profits out the deal while offsetting the costs to the society at large.  In Europe, the same thing is going on, but their invaders are mostly Muslims and assorted Africans, with the same results.

Again, the elites who benefit from all this, and who have become indifferent to the survival of Western Civilization because their profits are more important to them, constantly bombard the common people with propaganda about how wonderful all this immigration is, and how any resistance to it is downright pathological.  Any of the elite who don't go along with this program are attacked and marginalized, and we commoners are made to suffer for dissent in many ways, by being smeared as racists and xenophobes and by exclusion from education and employment.

Byron M. Roth, a professor of psychology, has written a book, The Perils of Diversity (see HERE), which analyzes both the dangers of immigration and the reasons for the elite's advocacy of it.  Like so many leftist/neocon tropes, immigration advocacy demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of human dynamics and human nature, either through naivety or malignancy.  You might look at it as an alliance between those who enrich themselves through exploitation of immigration and those who see immigration as another tool to destroy Western Civilization.  In both cases, there's either indifference to the plight of the common man or an active desire to make him suffer.  A full review of Roth's book is HERE.

Greeks asking for gifts

Apparently, Obama has decided to borrow some more money from China to give to the rapists at the IMF to pass on to Greece for graft, corruption, and big fat pensions for government workers.  Story HERE.


Seriously, what is it about Greece that makes it need a bailout?  Is it the foreign aid they send everywhere?  Is it the many wars they're financing in the Middle East?  No, they don't have outlays like that, as far as I know.  Well, if you want to know about Greece, ask a Greek.  Taki Theodoracopulos is a Greek.  He says THIS.

Our whacko Mid-East policies

Exactly why are we fighting three wars in the Islamic world right now?  And that's not even counting what's happening in Yemen.  Yeah, yeah, everybody says oil, and oil is certainly involved, but oil is fungible, and it's all over the world.  I mean, we have a much bigger military problem right at our own border with Mexico, and all our politicians seem determined to ignore it, while we pour money and lives and military hardware into places half a world away.  And, more important than the Arab world to us is the rest of Latin America, and we're for the most part totally ignoring that, too.

We were deep into the Middle East long before 911, remember, so there wasn't any real reason for revenge or retaliation, but there we were anyway, getting Marines killed in Lebanon and invading Iraq.  What was our incentive for all that?  At first glance, considering what the results of it all have been, it would seem that our policy has been to replace secular Muslim dictators with Islamic Fundamentalist dictators.  If that was our purpose, we're doing a fine job of it.  I know the Arab world varies, and the Islamic world varies even more, but one thing you don't find in any of it is any kind of history of free society or democratic institutions.  You don't bomb stuff like that into existence.  The destruction of order often results in chaos followed by worse order.  So when they tell you we're supporting democracy and freedom in the ME, they're either idiots or liars.  Democracy and freedom in the ME is just a period of chaos, likely resulting in crazy mullahs taking over.  The historical record seems to bear that out, doesn't it?

But I don't think our leaders are idiots, so I conclude that they're liars, and their purpose has indeed been to encourage and effectuate the growth of Islamic fundamentalism all over the ME.  Why would they want to do that?  Do they think Arabs will have better government and be happier people that way?  Do they think secular regimes like Mubarak's and Saddam Hussein's were so awful that a bunch of religious fanatics will be better?  Well, of course not.  Not better for the people of those countries, and certainly not better for our security, attracting terrorists to wander into the US and blow things up.  So who is it better for?

Robert T. Burnham is of the opinion that this is all for Israel's security.  A country with its ducks in a row by ME standards is a danger to Israel, and it's to their advantage to have chaos in all nearby countries.  At first glance, it seems that such a policy would bring fanatical Israel-haters more power and influence.  Ah, but with that sort of fanaticism you usually have incompetence as well.  And civil wars.  As long as the Iraqis are basically fighting each other, they can't get organized enough to threaten any other countries.  That goes for Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, etc.  So the Israeli foreign policy is rational for them.  Maybe short-sighted, but rational nonetheless.  The question is, why in the hell is it our policy, too?  It's certainly not good for us, or for our European allies.  Go figure.  Well, going along with our policy of creating chaos in the Islamic world is our policy of taking immigrants from there.  After giving them every reason in the world to hate us, we invite them to immigrate.  Burnham doesn't think it's a coincidence.  Read his piece HERE.

No more teachers' dirty looks — they just send a S.W.A.T. team

Have you heard?  Now the Department of Education sends S.W.A.T. teams out to collect student loans.  It may sound a little extreme, but hey — you can't have hope 'n' change without breaking a few eggs.  I knew there was an actual purpose for the Department of Education, I just didn't know what it was till now.  Bad Eagle gives us the details HERE.

OMG, Canada!

There are a lot of good things about Canada, I suppose.  They're kind of polite, they have a work ethic.  They seem like Americans in most ways.  But they also have a strange smugness about them about not being Americans.  I once heard a Canadian on a radio talk show saying she was glad Canada didn't have a Constitution like ours, because it would put unfair limits on what the Government can do.  Makes me glad about the Revolution, if I wasn't glad already.

Canada is a bit of a canary in a coal mine for us, because they seem to be just a bit more susceptible to political correctness tyranny than we are.  Maybe it's their confounded politeness.  When their Government orders them around, unlike curmudgeonly Americans, they think it would be rude to object, so they roll over and give up whatever liberties they have left without firing a shot.  Canada doesn't believe in military operations without the permission of the Queen, after all.  And, when they exhibit such lemming behavior, they feel superior to us grubby Yanks because of it.  Now, the same Marxist/nanny types who are ruling the roost in Canada certainly have their counterparts here, who rule part of our roost, but who can't rule it all, because of the wisdom of the Founders (or some of them) who insisted on that Bill of Rights, and because for whatever reason, we have a lot more Redneck types who damn well won't put up with it.

I read somewhere, long ago, and I wish I remembered who wrote it, that Canada suffers under three inferiority complexes.  One, obviously, with regard to the US, another to the UK, and a third to France.  They're sort of like a weak clone of all three, so they elevate their defects to virtues.

This post was set off by a coincidence.  I found two interesting posts about Canada's quirks in different places on the net this morning.  The first is about a stand-up comic who actually had to pay a fine for allegedly insulting a lesbian in his act, causing her all kinds of emotional stress.  No First Amendment, you see.  That story is HERE.

The second story, by the estimable Paul Gottfried, is about Canada's version of pulling down statues of Robert E. Lee.  The Marxist weasels there are now denouncing Canadians of the past, long dead, for being politically incorrect and want all their honors thrown into the Memory Hole.  One of these is Stephen Leacock, the Robert Benchley of Canada, who wrote such lines as:

He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.


Other Leacock quotes HERE.

Gottfried tells us all about it HERE.

Stephen Jay Gould

Cartoon by BALOO

Physics is a science,  Chemistry is a science.  Anthropology should be a science, but all too often it isn't that, but just another ideology masquerading as a science.  The reason for that, of course, is that anthropology is about human beings, and most ideology is also about human beings, and such ideologies don't like actual science sticking its nose in and upsetting their applecart.  The ideology loosely described as 'egalitarianism' has been around awhile, and is easily (and often deliberately) confused with the Christian doctrine of the equal moral worth of all human beings.  It's further confused by a misunderstanding of the Declaration of Independence, which reads in part:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Now frequently, only this part is quoted:

all men are created equal

And is used to buttress the ideology that states that all people are equal mentally, physically, morally, intellectually, and tempermentally, which is clearly absurd.  Reading the rest of it, we see that the equality is all about rights, not at all about inherent quality.  And what the Founders meant by "created equal" was that the concept of hereditary royalty and nobility was invalid.  Nobody is born a king or duke or peasant.

Well, this clearly ridiculous notion of the equal quality of all people has been shoved in our faces for many years, and charlatans like Stephen Jay Gould have done all in their power to convince us of this very counterintuitive notion.  Being an ideologue instead of a scientist, Gould did not hesitate to lie and fudge data to uphold his notion that all differences in human beings were a result of environment, and not heredity, which is about as unscientific a notion as you can imagine.

One of his lies and data-fudgings was used in the service of accusing a real scientist of the very same thing.  Steve Sailer blogs about that HERE.

Actual scientists who study actual human differences are pretty much pariahs in the anthropology community.  The revolt against this essentially Marxist egalitarianism cult was initiated by Edward O. Wilson's book, Sociobiology.  The term "sociobiology" has morphed into "evolutionary psychology," and one of the leaders in the discipline is Dr. Kevin MacDonald.  His blog is HERE.  Check it out.

THIS JUST IN!  Even more about Gould's chicanery here at Alternative Right.

Time for Cute Again

I've been told that I've been getting pretty serious again, so it's time for some more cute.  Can it possibly get any cuter than this?

The Palin Phenomenon

This design available on merchandise at ZAZZLE.

Limbaugh had a caller yesterday, a Hispanic woman, who said that the reason a lot of women hate Palin is that she's a "ten" and they're not. Limbaugh reacted as though it was a new idea to him, but of course it wasn't. He's smarter than that.  It's obvious to anybody who's been paying attention that the caller is right. But there's more to it that that.  She's a "ten" in more than looks.  She's also extremely able and assertive in a way the women who hate her could never be.  She's not the right kind of role model for feminists.  Feminists really hate women who accomplish things on their own.  The ideal role model is, of course, Hillary.  Hillary got where she is first by kissing up to the academic establishment, becoming an acolyte of Saul Alinski, and working her way up in the leftist establishment that likes to pretend it's anti-establishment.  She could have continued that way, parleying her connections to the established left, till she ended up as a big gun in the lesbian/feminist bloc in academia, never really doing anything, but by fawning and toadying till she became one of the alpha toads.  But she got lucky and found Bill, who clearly had the potential of becoming a successful politician, especially with an ambitious, pushy wife of Hillary's stripe.  So she rode that mule till she had enough political power through him to weasel her way into the Senate, and now she's, laughably, Secretary of State.  That's an approved career path.  Any little girl can aspire to be another Hillary.  No talent or brains required, just the willingness to jettison all integrity and self-respect and find a powerful man to get power and respect for her.  An old path, really.  Lots of tradition there.  Women who don't follow such paths, like Palin, Margaret Thatcher, Phyllis Schlafly, Ayn Rand, Taylor Caldwell, etc., are roundly despised by the feminist snakepit.

But that awful Sarah Palin!  She didn't vamp her way into the ivy leagues, instead she basically worked her way through college like most of us do, married a nice guy she loved instead of selling herself to a big shot, and proceeded to work her way into political office without the help of organized feminism, academia, or a political party.  And by all accounts, along the way, she's raised her kids without turning them over to the Alaska State Troopers.  What little girl can aspire to that?  That's too hard!  I'm reminded of what someone, I think it was Jules Feiffer, said about Batman and Robin.  He said that as a kid, he loved Batman, because a 13-year-old like him could conceivably aspire, one day, to be Batman.  But that damn Robin was 13.  And he could do all that neat stuff that others his age didn't have a prayer of doing.  Being Robin was an impossible fantasy.

Being Sarah Palin is also an impossible fantasy for most women.  They're not smart enough, good-looking enough, determined enough, or able enough.  Is it an American thing, or what, that leads us to want our politicians to be no better than we are?  That's not the same thing as wanting them to be like us.  Nobody thought Andrew Jackson was an ordinary guy, but they liked the fact that he had ordinary origins, and would therefore run things in the way the ordinary guy would if he had the ability to run things.  He wasn't some kind of New England or Virginia aristocrat who had a different agenda from the common man.  Palin clicks into that conception as well, which explains her appeal.  We like her because she is one of us but has abilities greater than we do.  She's smarter than most of us, but thinks like we do.  And yes, she's smart, people.  Calling dangerous Republicans stupid is an old Democrat meme that goes back to Eisenhower.  Biden says more stupid things on one speech than Palin has in her whole career.  The subtext of calling people like Palin stupid is that they're off the reservation. They're too "stupid" to join the herd and learn all the taboos and follow the leader off the cliff.  A Good Little Girl, like Hillary, is the teacher's pet type, regurgitating all the dogma, following the approved path all the way. Pathetic, really.

And, it's important to remember, a lot of women aren't like that at all.  They admire Palin, as well they should.  Oh, I admire her too, but I don't want her to be President, not because she lacks ability, but because she has policies I disagree with.  I don't want any of the current candidates to be President, except, of course, Ron Paul.

Obammigration

Buy this design on merchandise at ZAZZLE.

Anybody who thinks Obama has the slightest interest in enforcing our immigration laws is kidding himself.  He's worse... well, that's impossible... he's as bad as Bush was.  It's clear to see why.  Illegal immigrants will vote Democrat, simple as that.  And please, in this era of massive voter fraud, don't tell me that illegal aliens can't vote.  They can and do.  As to why Republicans go along with all this, that's somewhat harder to understand and explain, but I think I can sum it up by saying that Republicans are essentially Assistant Democrats.

Washington Watcher sums up the Obama Administration's immigration policy HERE.

Ron Paul on the last nail in the coffin

Despite their rhetoric, most Republicans in Congress seem eager to let Obama do as he likes, and keep voting him more and more power to do whatever he wants.  Which side are they on again?  Well, there's always one exception.  Here's a speech by Ron Paul.

Satoshi Kanazawa Fired

Satoshi Kanazawa, an insightful evolutionary psychologist, has been fired from his column at Psychology Today because he hurt somebody's feelings by writing about the differences in attractiveness between the races.  One story is HERE.  Another HERE.  Apparently any dissent from the egalitarian Zeitgeist is a firing offense in our PC world. Just Google his name to find a lot more stuff, including the magazines apology for publishing his article.  Having done that, if you agree that Psychology Today has behaved in a cowardly, unethical manner, you can let them know.  A list of email addresses for them is HERE.

UPDATE.  You can see Kanazawa's old blog posts HERE.

Liberalism as a denial of reality

One of the primary distinctions between liberalism and conservatism is that conservatism tends to take reality into account when formulating policy, and liberalism does not.  That phenomenon can be related to maturity.  Children hate rules, and come up with all kinds of rationalization as to why there shouldn't be any rules in general, and/or why the child in question should be exempt from them.  Adults know that rules are there for a reason, good or bad, and that you'd better understand that reason before you experiment with doing away with the rules.  Another way to look at it is to consider that conservatives think about the world as it is, while liberals think about the world as they'd like it to be.

Now, one manifestation of rules in society is the institution of marriage.  Marriage traditions and customs differ from culture to culture, but it seems that the concept of marriage is indeed a human universal.  All human cultures have found a need for that particular set of rules.  All too often, we see differences — polygamy vs. monogamy, romantic marriage vs. arranged marriage, etc. — and forget the significance and universalism of the similarities.

So, instead of trying to comprehend the way marriage fits into the underpinnings of human culture, liberals like to "redefine" it, i. e., make it up as they go along, and tell us that there are "different kinds of families" and Heather has two mommies and all behavior is equally worthy yadda yadda yadda.  Unfortunately, a lot of libertarians accept this liberal meme, and take it even further than liberals do, with their theory that there is no validity to any human group, only human individuals.  That's just wrong.  Human beings aren't solitary creatures like leopards.  We're pack creatures, like wolves.  We exist, on the basic level, as members of cultures, that share assumptions and consensus about acceptable behavior and morality. Within those cultures, we also exist as members of lesser groups — religions, economic classes, families, etc.  So, we influence each other by our behavior, and the strength of social institutions affects us as individuals.  Yes, we are individuals.  And individual autonomy is a human ideal, particularly a Western ideal, but it's an ideal in contrast to collectivism, a situation in which there's not enough individual autonomy.  Total individual autonomy is not possible or desirable for out species.  To sum this up, the institution of marriage influences all members of a society, whether they participate directly in it or not.

So the liberal/libertarian/neocon meme that gay marriage can't undermine marriage as an institution is just plain wrong.  Another leftist slogan about how the world ought to be, rather than how it really is.

Odinism or Asatru

I'm not a religious person at all, but I have to admit, this is an example of strong proselytization:

Nothing about Anthony Weiner in this Post

Hizbullah and the Iranian Connection

by "the Colonel" 

Iranian Muslim extremist President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map… this fake regime (Israel) cannot logically continue to live.”  His comments have drawn widespread condemnation from civilized nations in the

world community.  Increasing alarm over Ahmadinejad’s outrageous comments is the fact that his government isgaining speed in their pursuit of the capability to produce nuclear

weapons. Clearly Iran, under the radical Ahmadinejad rule, fits the classic definition of a terrorist state.  His comments about destroying Israel is, in fact, policy among many Mid-eastern terrorist organizations.  They differ in approaches, but nearly all Muslim extremist terrorist organizations agree that the removal of Israel is the first step in the global Jihad of Islamic Imperialism.  Some international scholars

name Iran a key player in what’s called the new “Axis of Islam” growing in the Middle East.  They see a sinister force created by the uniting of Hizbullah, Iran, Syria, Hammas, the Muslim

Brotherhood, elements of Iraq’s Shiites and others in an anti-Israel, anti-American alliance backed by Russia.

The Lebanon based terrorist organization Hizbullah (Arabic for

Party of God) is an Islamist Shiite group inspired by the Iranian

revolution of 1979 and formed soon after.  Also known by several

other names, Hizbullah’s long range goal is the

extension of radical Shiite Islamist ideologies worldwide.  Their

shorter range objectives are the expulsion of western and Israeli

influence, establishment of an Islamist state in Lebanon

patterned after the Iranian Islamic Republic, the destruction of

Israel, and the capture and rule of Jerusalem.  Hizbullah leaders

view the United States as their real enemy.  A noteworthy aspect of

 their ideology is openness to cooperation with Sunni and

 other Islamist groups.  Studies reveal their connections with other

 terrorist groups including; al-Queda, Hammas, the P.L.O., Fatah,

and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to name a few.  Like al-Queda,

Hizbullah’s reach is worldwide, extending from the Mid-east to

Central and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.  In

North America,  Hizbullah operated and raised funds from Canada

until 2002 when finally outlawed.  That same year

two operatives were arrested in the Carolinas and convicted of

providing material support to a terrorist group. 

The Iranian connection to Hizbullah is important since

Hizbullah is based in a country bordering Israel.  Estimates

indicate Iran provides them more than $100 million annually,

underwriting social services and military equipment and supplies. 

Of Iranian attempts to export their Islamic revolution, Hizbullah

is the most successful, giving Iran an operational arm bordering

Israel.  Hizbullah’s terrorist operations are conducted in

coordination with Tehran.

 Another geographical partner with Hizbullah is Syria.  Their

relationship is complex and although officially secular, Syria

helped found Hizbullah.    Syria supports Hizbullah’s international

terrorist activities against Israel.  Massive shipments of weapons

were transferred from Iran to Lebanon via Damascus, Syria.  The

current President of Syria is much closer to the leadership of

Hizbullah than was his father.

Hizbullah pioneered many terrorist tactics, including suicide

bombings and simultaneous truck or car bombings.  They’ve also

developed expertise in building effective explosive devices.  Since

Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, Hizbullah has received

enormous amounts of weaponry from Iran:  sophisticated anti-

aircraft and anti-tank missiles, over 12,000 medium and

long range rockets,  placing more than a third of Israel within

 striking range.  It’s not difficult to believe that Iran’s President

Ahmadinejad would like to deliver nuclear weapons to his proxy

on Israel’s border.

Between 1983 and 2003 approximately sixty four incidents of Hizbullah generated terrorism were conducted.  These included kidnappings, assassinations, torture, suicide bombings and other mayhem resulting in about 800 people killed and more than 1400 wounded, maimed or otherwise injured.  Their targets included both military and civilian personnel world wide.  Most events were directed at Israel and their citizens, but other nationalities, including U.S. citizens, were also targeted.  Hizbullah’s most infamous terrorist attack directed at the United States was the 1983 suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marine Headquarters and barracks of the Peacekeeping force in Beirut, Lebanon murdering of 241 young Marines and injuring many others.  A nearby French base was also targeted, resulting in the deaths of approximately 60 French soldiers. 

Like al-Queda and Hammas, Hizbullah is a radical and lethal terrorist organization based on its own despicable merits.  When combined with the current Iranian government and others, their lethality and capability for mass murder and mayhem increases exponentially as a threat to freedom and western civilization.