Rednecks

"Redneck" is a term that's been around for awhile, and evidently originally referred to poor White farmers who, due to the fact that they worked outside in the sun all the time, had sunburned, therefore red, necks.  But nowadays it basically means any White person who is not a smug, condescending liberal. Paradoxically, in order to be smug and condescending to other White people, you have to be a fawning lickspittle with regard to nonWhite people. Not much middle ground there.  So I'm going to postulate a basic dichotomy here, dividing the White race into rednecks and liberals.  Now, rednecks are widely thought of as ignorant and bigoted, because if they weren't, they'd be liberals, right?  Anyhow, it's not restricted to those poor White farmers any more, but applies to Whites everywhere, from Australia to Russia to Italy to Scotland to Alabama, who haven't been anointed by the Church of Liberalism.

Me, now, I'm a redneck.  You see, it doesn't matter how educated or accomplished you are — the only way to stop being a redneck is to convert to liberalism.  That is usually considered some kind of enlightenment process, where you come to realize and admit publicly that all races and cultures are equal, and that your own White race and culture is inferior to all others.  That's why I call it the Church of Liberalism — it requires faith that what seem like logical contradictions are actually deeper truths. Liberalism is a religious faith masquerading as a political philosophy, cleverly avoiding First Amendment restrictions.

To shift gears a little, the Democratic party used to be the party of the rednecks.  The liberals were pretty thin on the ground by current standards till a few decades ago, and they mostly found themselves in the Republican party.  But when FDR got into the social engineering business, the liberals were intrigued, and started wandering in his direction.  By Truman's time, a lot of us rednecks were beginning to catch on that the Democrats weren't altogether in our corner any more, and there was a Dixiecrat revolt in 1948.  LBJ made it clear, finally, that the Democrats had pretty much abandoned us in favor of everybody else, and the last gasp of the redneck wing of the Democratic party was the George Wallace candidacy.  With George McGovern's nomination, it was totally clear that the Democratic party was now the party of the nonrednecks, and was totally committed to the interests of Blacks, Jews, gays, foreigners of every kind, sexual deviants, gun-controllers, atheists, and anybody and anything except us rednecks. So where did we go, politically? We went to the Republican party, of course.  Where else?  Scott Locklin gives us the nasty details HERE.

OMG, Canada

Just when you think we're completely drowned in politically correct insanity here, you can take a perverse comfort in the fact that Canada is even more screwed up.  You can't make this stuff up.  A quick summary:  In Kitchener, Ontario, a four-year-old girl drew a picture of a gun at school.  The authorities panicked and summoned the police.  When the girl's father showed up to pick her up from school, the police arrested and strip-searched him, and later searched his house, finding nothing. You can read the whole story HERE.  The link is from the DailyKenn.

Sudden Death Overtime in the Great Game

I've written about the Great Game before, but I've refrained from commenting on the latest hopeless Koran-burning mess because I thought, naively, that its significance was obvious.  Silly me.  I've heard all kinds of analysis of it, and everybody on all sides of the issue seems to miss the point. (I'm sure Pat Buchanan will get it right, but as far as I know he hasn't done a column on this latest stuff yet.  If he does, I'll add a link.) (And he just did.  Click HERE.)

Lots of analogies spring to mind when it comes to Afghanistan.  One is the "domestic dispute" situation that I'm sure any cop could tell you about.  That's where cops get called in to a domestic dispute, usually to protect a wife from a husband, and it ends with the couple ganging up on the cop.  Another is the "wrong bar" scenario, where some decent citizen is walking past a bad sort of bar, witnesses a brawl inside, and decides to go in and stop the fight, getting his own clock cleaned and improving the situation in the bar not at all.  In both cases, the citizen and the cop use their own resources to try to accomplish something unaccomplishable, if I may coin a word.

Of course Afghanistan can be pacified.  All you have to do is remove all the Afghans and resettle the place with Norwegians. You just can't pacify Afghans.  Lord knows we've tried.  As did the Russians, the Brits, and Alexander the Great, and probably some prehistoric do-gooders we don't know anything about.

The accurate analysis of Afghanistan, including the Koran-burning mess, is that we shouldn't be there.  It's the wrong bar.  It's a domestic dispute. It's impossible for Westerners to be there without offending the local norms and, unless they're brain-dead multiculturalist liberals, being offended by the local norms. Which include, of course, a hideous attitude towards women, and a well-established tradition of pedophilia that grosses other Muslims out.  And now we have the Koran thing.  Of course Obama shouldn't be apologizing for that.  In the first place, he probably has no idea what actually happened, and even if it was a conscious intention to offend, that's what happens when you have foreigners occupying a country.  Everywhere and at all times, occupying troops offend the locals.  Just look at our own Civil War, fought between two groups that differed culturally hardly at all. If you're going to invade somebody, you're going to piss them off, simple as that. If they want to be offended — and rest assured, they will want to — they'll find something, real or imagined, to be offended by.

So when you're considering invading some other country, you have to take that into account.  No matter what your intentions are, the locals are not going to appreciate them.  You have to kill some of them, for crying out loud.  Nobody appreciates that.  I repeat, it doesn't matter what your intentions are.  War in general and invasions in particular are a very grim decision.  You have to consider whether the outcome of the war is going to justify all the death on both sides, the money you're going to spend, and the creation of a long-time enemy.  Another thing to consider, of course, is the people you're invading.  Some people are a lot easier to pacify than others.  Afghans are among the hardest.

Well, we've been messing around in the Middle East in a big way ever since Old Bush pulled the first screw-up.  Now we have half the area totally destabilized and mad as hell at us, and the neocons are champing at the bit for us to outrage the other half.  The only dispute between the liberals and neocons is how best to screw it up even more.  Ron Paul's "mind your own business" foreign policy sounds better all the time.

Anyhow, I was going to bring Kipling up again, but the inimitable Steve Sailer beat me to it.  He points out that Kipling wouldn't be a bit surprised by the situation, and adds an illustrative video HERE.

George Schuyler

Guest post by Baloo.

Well, here it is Black History Month again, and I've been planning for awhile to write something about George Schuyler.  Ex-Army invited me to, because I have a tenuous connection with Schuyler.  A few years back, I collaborated with L. Neil Smith and Scott Bieser on the graphic novel, Roswell, Texas. You can read it HERE. Quick summary: it's an alternate-history story about a parallel world where Davy Crockett survived at the Alamo, and Santa Ana didn't, resulting in Crockett becoming President of a Texas that never joined the Union and remains a separate country today.  It's a semi-utopia, because this alternate Texas has all of the virtues of our United States magnified, and none of the defects.  In its history, Charles Lindbergh was President of Texas during the Roswell incident in 1947, and his son, the one who was kidnapped and killed in our history, was also President of Texas in the 1960's.  In between their presidencies, George Schuyler was Texas President.  Interestingly, Schuyler's daughter, Philippa Schuyler, married the young Lindbergh.  You can see her picture on the President's desk HERE. And it's rumored that a movie about her is in the works.  Info in this little video:

I hope it happens, if only to draw attention to her father, who has been dropped down the memory hole, because he just doesn't fit the Liberal Black Agenda these days.  He was, you see, long before Tom Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Walter Williams, a conservative.  An oddball conservative, to be sure, but he was totally off the liberal reservation.  I'll tell you how far off.

Today, Martin Luther King is a hero to everybody.  Pseudo-Conservatives and neocons have added him to their pantheon.  He is beyond criticism and above reproach.  Here's what Schuyler wrote about MLK in 1964:

Neither directly nor indirectly has Dr. King made any contribution to world (or even domestic) peace. Methinks the Lenin Prize would have been more appropriate, since it is no mean feat for one so young to acquire 60 communist front citations…. Dr. King's principle contribution to world peace has been to roam the country like some sable Typhoid Mary, infecting the mentally disturbed with perversions of Christian doctrine, and grabbing fat lecture fees from the shallow-pated.

Now, I'd write some more about this, but a far better scholar, Nicholas Stix (from whose blog I lifted the quote above), has beaten me to it.  The near-total suppression of any and all awareness of George Schuyler is a triumph of the liberal/neocon elite who call the cultural and political shots for us all these days.  I recommend that you google around and learn all you can about Schuyler.  It'll give you a quite different fell for the history of "Civil Rights."  And you can start with Nicholas Stix's article HERE.

A = A, More or Less

From BALOO'S WEBSITE

There's a phrase running through my mind — "A thing is what it is, and not something else." Anybody know where I picked it up from?  Sounds like something a rabbi said, or maybe Confucius.  But whoever said it, you have to admit it's true.  It's equivalent to A=A, as Aristotle said, and as Ayn Rand liked to remind us. So when you're talking about a thing, it's really helpful to know what that thing is, and for those you're talking to also to know what it is.  That's getting harder and harder.  A long story this morning, that Fox News keeps repeating over and over, about "shoppers" rioting in Orlando because some new sneaker went on sale.  Yeah, "shoppers." Much more accurate to call them Blacks, but of course somebody will point out that they're not all Black, and they'll find some White punks involved, too, just as they always do when Blacks riot, or at least standing nearby, so they can end up with a politically correct news item after all.  So in this case, A=A, but you can't call it A, of course.  You have to call it a hieroglyph or a pattern of lines on paper, or something else, because just "A" can't be said aloud, unless you have a story about how A's are being discriminated against by all the other letters. Then you can say it.

And that's just the news.  It's just the same in politics.  When a halfway decent politician is aware of a certain fact, he knows damn well that he can't actually talk about the fact, or he'll get smashed.  So he talks about other things, in the hopes that some people with be made aware thereby that he's actually aware of the taboo fact.  Let's say immigration.  The fact is that we're getting millions of illegal Latino immigrants who don't fit into our culture at all.  They have a quite different set of social values than basic White Americans do.  They have little interest in what we call civic pride or the rule of law.  They consider drunk driving macho.  They've been told before they got here that Whitey oppresses them and show up looking for revenge.  They have little interest in education and have an attitude towards women that doesn't fit our paradigm at all.  Many of them seem to consider rape and murder no big deal. And they have virtually no interest in assimilation and many actually try to keep their offspring from assimilating.  That's the fact.  Now, politicians who recognize this fact as a problem are thin on the ground, but even those who do are scared silly to mention that fact, so they say other things instead.  At the top of the list, they talk about how we're a "nation of immigrants," which is a really stupid thing to say.  What we actually are is a nation of Northwest Europeans who left Europe and organized another Northwest European country here.  The only politician who's dared say that lately is Pat Buchanan.  No, instead they say how crazy they are about legal immigration, and act like the big problem is that these people came here illegally.  It's not.  The big problem is that they're here, where they don't fit.  Then they talk about "immigration reform," which is usually just a way of saying amnesty.  That's like having a big rape problem and talking about "sex reform."

And of course this applies to the whole race/culture problem which affects education, foreign policy, law enforcement, and economics.  They have to carefully avoid the facts and talk about some of the effects without ever mentioning the causes. This, of course, means that the fact that the liberals/Democrats/neocons control the dialog, making it virturally impossible for any of the real facts to even be mentioned, let alone be discussed.

Steve Sailer expands on this phenomenon, with a particularly interesting insight on how it's affected the gun control debate over the years,  HERE.

Hope and Change since 1963!

Some of the young'uns are really proud of their Obama, what with his heaving piles of money around from here to there, sending troops all over the world, and opening the borders to Democrats from all those vibrant Third-World countries.  And they should be. Who would have thought it possible that he'd be a bigger spender than Bush.  Or that he'd involve us in even more foreign wars? But he did. So does that make him the greatest spender/invader ever?  Yes and no.  It's true that Obama's government is the worst ever, sure, but he stands on the shoulders of giants. Obama didn't start from scratch, you know. His money-pit health care plans were made possible by the pioneering efforts of old Beagle-Swinger, there, LBJ, with his Medicare and Medicaid.  If it hadn't been for LBJ's innovations in intervention theory that gave us the triumph of Vietnam, would Obama be sending troops to central Africa?  I think not.  And if it weren't for the already-mentioned wonders of Medicaid, I doubt that Obama would be able to attract nearly as many illegal aliens here to get free care in hospitals (including maternity wards for those ever-popular anchor babies). Without Lyndon's guns and butter system, would Obama be able to convince people to vote for both eternal war abroad and massive handouts to bums and con men at home?  And too many people have forgotten LBJ's clever division of the country into those who serve and those who eat at the trough with his great system combining the draft with student deferments.  That produced a whole generation of draft-dodging elitists, from Gingrich to Cheney to Clinton, and even Obama's own pet Joe Biden.

And without LBJ's brilliant Affirmative Action system, would Obama have slid through the educational system, seemingly or actually effortlessly, and ended up with the greatest Affirmative Action job of them all?  And, finally, without LBJ's relaxed interpretation of immigration laws, and relaxed definition of just what an American is, would Obama have been possible in any sense whatsoever?  Hardly.

So give credit where credit is due.  Obama is just running a mopping-up operation, removing the last vestiges of prudence, common sense, and responsible behavior from the remnants of that boring old White-dominated United States, and getting us in shape to take our place as the greatest of the Third-World nations.  The credit for the opening battle and first victory belongs to Johnson.  We didn't go quite all the way with LBJ, but Obama's finishing the job.

Those much younger than I don't remember those exciting years, when LBJ gave us the civil rights and feminism and massive government spending and War on Poverty and interminable literal war that prepared the way for Obamaism, but Pat Buchanan does. He was there.  And he tells us what all that has resulted in HERE.

Newt Backed by Patriot!

All the candidates have their big-money supporters, and what with the tangle of campaign-finance laws, it's hard to tell who's giving what to whom, and what their hidden agendas are.  Are they buying access? Wanting special favors? Just getting a kick out of being in the game?  Well, one thing Newt Gingrich can proudly claim is that his biggest donor is a 100% patriot. Unlike a lot of fat cats, he served in the Army.  Not only that — his wife and daughter did military service, and he hopes that his two young sons will do the same!  Now, that kind of thing trumps any silly allegations about connections with organized crime or any other sleazy behavior.  He's given millions to Newt's campaign and will probably give more in the future — because he's zealously in support of the welfare of his country, and it comes before any other considerations, and he considers Newt the best possible supported of the defense of his country.  I heard Newt himself tell Chris Wallace that.

I have to agree.  If your number one priority is the interest of Sheldon Adelson's country, Newt's your man.  He's certainly Sheldon's.  Steve Sailer describes all this in more detail HERE.

A Conservative Alternative to the Drudge Report

Don't get me wrong. The Drudge Report is just fine and I look at it at least once a day.  But if you keep track of it, you'll conclude that it's somewhere between moderate and standard neocon in its positioning of stories and links and headlines. In short, much better than the websites of any of the networks, but still a bit lacking.  But there's a conservative alternative out there, and I've been consulting it more and more frequently.  It's called "Daily Kenn," and you can find it HERE.  Just taking a look at today's offerings, we have a headline about gun rights, a conservative cartoon by my friend Baloo, and links to stories about phony complaints of racism, the fact that we now have troops in four African countries, the across-the-border mess in El Paso, and lots of material on the Obamas and their whacky, scary, plans for America.  All that, plus the same sort of links to other sites that you find on Drudge. Stuff you won't find in the Mainstream Media, and only very rarely on Drudge or at Fox.

Daily Kenn is the work of Kenn Gividen, the Libertarian candidate for Governor of Indiana in 2004. You can see him debate HERE. He describes himself as a Conservative Libertarian, which sounds a lot like Libertarian Nationalist, and, I'd guess, he belongs in the Green Zone of the famous VENN DIAGRAM, where all good Americans belong if they only realized it.  He wrote THIS ARTICLE on religious liberty.  And there's a compilation of HIS QUOTES HERE.

Go take a look at http://www.dailykenn.com/ every day. I do.

"Hitchers," by Will McIntosh

Guest review by BALOO

Hi, Ex-Army folk.  Ex came across this book, and got me to read it and do the review because, well, I'm a cartoonist. It's a fun read, and more or less fits into the horror genre, having a little Alfred Hitchcockiness about it.  Also, it's set in Atlanta, which helps give it a Southern Gothic creepiness, much as is the case with The Walking Dead. McIntosh is a Brit, but he's a prof in the South so he's acquainted with the area.

But to the plot. One of the biggest gripes cartoonists have is the fact that comic strips are continued after their creators die.  Me, now, I don't have a problem with that, because I understand free-market economics, and I know that keeping a good strip going is often a wise decision.  I do add the caveat that I want them to keep it good, otherwise I'm disappointed, and I'd prefer that they end it and replace it with something better.  But that's just me.  Such strips as Blondie, Dick Tracy, Frank and Ernest, Thimble Theatre, Ziggy, and Gasoline Alley have kept on going after the deaths of their creators — sometimes after the deaths of the successors — and still have a large fan base.  More often, a strip dies with the creator, either by the wishes of the creator himself, as was the case with Peanuts, or sometimes because no one can be found to continue it well enough.

Hitchers is the story of one such comic strip, Toy Shop.  Finn Darby is a young cartoonist who lost his wife in a bizarre accident, and he's spent his personal and professional life in the shadow of his grandfather, Tom Darby, who created the long-lived comic strip, Toy Shop, and who ordered that the strip be discontinued after his death. After a bit of agonizing, for a number of reasons (he really hated the old guy), Finn convinces the syndicate to continue the strip with him drawing it.  The strip was never a blockbuster, just a steady source of a decent income, and Finn decides that it needs to be improved.  He adds a character or two, and modernizes the humor, and is delighted when the strip suddenly becomes a sensation after being moribund for decades and even gets mentioned on talk shows. But this is a horror story, you know, and old Tom Darby is outraged (in Hell or wherever he is) that Finn has had the effrontery to not only continue the strip but even to change it, and decides to come back....

Don't want any spoilers here.  Suffice it to say that many things happen.  In the middle of the Revenge of Grandpa, Finn experiences a terrorist attack, roving bands of religious fanatics, and even odder psycho/supernatural phenomena.  There's even room for a love story.  Good read.  I recommend it.

Rising Scum

Me, I prefer the Clintons to the Kennedys.  Why?  Because they don't reproduce so damn much. We got through Slick Willy, and we may have to endure a little more of Hillary, but we can hope and pray that Chelsea will be happy spending the money her parents stole, and not inflict herself on the political system.  But the Kennedys are a hydra of far more than seven heads.  They keep popping up all over the place.  And they are all, without exception, positively the scum of the earth. Scum does rise, you know, while bottom-feeders like Clinton have to crawl up the side of the pan, stepping on their colleagues on the way.  Kennedys just bubble up, effortlessly, because of the dopiness of a certain strain of American voter.  Beats the hell out of me.  The best of the bunch, Jack Kennedy, always looked to me like he ought to be working in a casino.  Some stuff on the latest revelations about him HERE.

To most of us out here in the hinterland, the "Irish" part of the Kennedys is just colorful, and many Americans who think they themselves are Irish are actually Scotch-Irish, which isn't Irish at all and only slightly Scotch.  But it's a real thing there in Boston, and it has informed the destiny of old Joe Kennedy and the hellish brood he spawned.  Thing is, old Joe was kind of out to destroy the Wasp establishment.  That's understandable.  The Wasps can be a pain in the ass, what with their superior attitude towards us rednecks, and they definitely needed to be taken down a peg or two.  But old Joe didn't want to straighten them out, he wanted to humilate them, and he didn't care if he took the whole country down with them, including his own family.

The Kennedys and their hangers-on are just in much in favor of wrecking the United States as are Obama, the Clintons, and the neocons.  They're most decidedly part of the treason lobby, that wants open borders, unrestricted immigration, and the ultimate marginalization and destruction of White America. It's a hate thing, folks.  If you're the normal Ex-Army reader, all those people hate you, and want you to shut up, pay your taxes, welcome any and all immigrants from God knows where, and send your sons off to die fighting other people's wars in defense of other people's nations, and to hell with ours.

So the latest Kennedy whelp is running for Queen Barney's seat in Congress.  Big surprise.  Mitt Romney should get some kind of award just for living through politics in Kennedychusetts.  Matthew Richer tells us more about Joseph Pissant Kennedy III HERE.

Spunky Santorum

Cartoon from BALOO WEBSITE

I don't particularly like Rick Santorum, because he's basically a neocon, with the usual neocon defects, but he's been getting interestingly spunky lately.  He's saying there's something wrong with Obama's theology.  Horrors!  Obama claims to be a Christian, of course, and if you can't believe a Chicago politician, who can you believe?  Anyhow, Santorum wussed out immediately and said he was sure that Obama is indeed a Christian, though how Santorum can read Obama's mind is beyond me. Now, I can't read Obama's mind, but I think it's pretty clear that he's not religious in any meaningful sense, unless you consider leftist dogma a religion, which is of course what Santorum really meant.

And what Santorum meant is valid, so that's why the media are piling on. Obama most certainly does not think in traditional American moral terms, but in what Santorum calls "secular" terms.  Now, I don't think Obama worships anything but his own precious scrawny ass, but Santorum states that Christianity calls on us to be the Earth's steward, not its worshiper. And though I'm not a Christian, I have to say that his attitude makes perfect sense.  You know, we don't clean off the picnic table in the park because we worship picnic tables, but because we have consideration for others who will also want to use it.  And that's the way civilized, sane human being should act.  Obama doesn't worship the Earth, but he has lots of whacky supporters who do, so of course he toes the radical environmentalist line.

Anyhow, this kerfluffle has caused Pat Buchanan to weigh in on the controversy.  I'm always glad to have Pat's evaluation of anything, and this is his evaluation of Santorum HERE.

Pat Buchanan and White America

From the ATLANTEA THE BEAUTIFUL website

The thing about Pat Buchanan is that he's a tribalist.  And I mean that as a compliment.  All human beings, without exception, are tribal — they belong either to tribes, or to supertribes, like ethnic groups, races, or nations.  Tribalists are people who know that, and who know what tribe they belong to, and consider it a proper way to live.  And, unlike most so-called conservatives, Pat is well aware that he's a White American and that his first loyalty should be to his own group.  Now, outside the White race, everybody else is encouraged to be tribal — Blacks, Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, anybody at all who can't or won't be a part of the White Supertribe. And, as long as this tribalism doesn't get to the point of hatred of other tribes, it's normal and actually quite healthy.  It would be healthy for us, too, because our selective anti-tribalism is killing us, both as individuals and as a people.

It's not a zero-sum game, you know.  If you love your own people and put their interests first, that doesn't necessarily mean hostility to other peoples.  On the contrary, groups who are loyal to themselves and put their own interests first are stable and secure, and as such can maintain cordial relations with other groups who behave the same way.  But flaky people who say they're "members of the human race" can't seem to avoid either abjectly surrendering to outside groups, like liberals love to do, or paternalistically interfering with other groups in an attempt to "bring them up to our level," like the neocons do. A group that desires neither to destroy other groups, or improve them through meddling, can easily get along with other groups and have mutually beneficial relations with them.  Just as sovereign individuals can do the same — they neither attack nor attempt to reform other sovereign
individuals.  And behold, you have a thriving society of cooperative individuals.  Nations, races, tribe, ethic groups — they can all get along similarly.

I've never read anything quite like this from Pat, but I expect he'd agree with it. Further analysis of Pat's outrageous firing from MSNBC by Kevin MacDonald HERE.

Philosophical Contradictions

From BALOO'S WEBSITE

Invalid paradigms, in philosophy, politics, or any logical system, invariably contradict themselves. Often, this takes the form of a paradox. If you have a paradox popping up in the way you think about something, you'd better reconcile it before you do any more thinking with it.  As Ayn Rand said, "check your premises."

When your system ignores reality, as so many do, it comes to the wrong conclusions.  Like Baloo's guru, there, you find yourself falling off your mountain into reality.  The current established philosophy that goes by various names — liberalism, progressivism, neoconservatism, political correctness — is pretty much based on ignoring unpleasant facts of reality, with predictable results.

One of my favorite manifestations of this is the downgrading of traditional morality, while at the same time using the fundamentals of traditional morality to bolster deviancy from it.  Just to give one example:

The traditional White Christian family is completely scorned by the Zeitgeist.  The men are sexist, uptight loons, the wives are sneered at as "mothers" who aren't fulfilled by having careers as lawyers in short skirts.  The kids are of course oppressed and racist.  The whole thing is just awful and has to be replaced by its opposite.  On the other hand, the Zeitgeist values homosexuality, Third-World immigration, single motherhood, and the irresponsible "vibrant" behavior of all who don't belong to the traditional White Christian family paradigm.

And how do they defend these new variants?  By likening them to the actual conditions produced by the norm.  Immigrants are "just like us."  They have a mom and a dad and kids, and are described as though they're operated by Ward and June Cleaver.  Same goes for homosexuals.  The hideous, dysfunctional lifestyle of most homosexuals is ignored, and we're asked to cheer on homosexual "marriage" and adoption because a same-sex marriage is just like us. They mow their lawns and have marital fidelity and go to PTA meetings just like we do, except that their sexual practices are somewhat different.  Not better or worse than heterosexuality, just equal with it.  Well, maybe a little better.

And despite the fact that gay marriage is a wonderful thing, single motherhood is wonderful, too.  Fathers aren't necessary at all.  In fact, with their male privilege, they just screw everything up.  Thank God the government is taking over their paycheck responsibilities, so these single moms can be "independent," and "feel good about themselves.

And, of course, Christianity is superstitious and oppressive, but nonChristian religions are vibrant and deep, and we must have respect for witch doctors and voodoo practioners and Imams with bombs in their underwear and foaming-at-the-mouth Israeli "settlers."  Christians who want to install a nativity scene anywhere but in their own basement are oppressing everybody else, but... Well, you know the drill.  I'm raving again.  This phenomenon is dealt with in a cooler, less emotional manner bye OneSTDV HERE.

Progressivism = Bullyism?

BULLY!

The Founding Fathers weren't progressives.  They were constitutionalists.  Actually, some of them opposed the Constitution, not because they wanted progressive government, but because they thought the Constitution granted too much power to the Federal Government.  So, a better spectrum than conservative/liberal might be constitutionalist/progressive.

By today's standards, almost all our Presidents were constitutionalists for the first century or so.  Presidents even vetoed legislation because it was unconstitutional.  Can you imagine Obama doing that? No, the progressives, who showed up in force around the end of the 19th Century, were basically sick and tired of the Constitution, and wanted to circumvent it, because they had wonderful plans to fix everything, and the Constitution limited their power too much.  It's not that those who had gone before were perfect. Far from it. Really bad glitch with Lincoln and the Civil War, but in those days, at least, they really felt that they had to amend the Constitution instead of just ignoring it.

But the progressives really got into the "ignoring" thing. What they wanted to do, of course, was exercise more power than they were legally allotted, because They Knew Better, and if they could just order Americans around, America would be a better place.  How's that working out? Well, there were a lot of progressives, but the one everybody thinks of is Teddy Roosevelt, because he wasn't subtle about it at all, but actually ran for President as the nominee of the Progressive Party.

Well, progressivism kind of fell out of favor, so the progressives had to come up with another euphemism to describe themselves, and they picked "liberal," which is a scream, because in those days it meant minimalist government and economic freedom.  They took the word over, and now it means the opposite, and that confuses our friends in Europe, because they mostly still use the word with its old meaning.  Anyhow, now that everybody knows who the liberals are, and the old word "progressive" has been forgotten, not they're using that as their new euphemism.  Their philosophy remains pretty much the same.  Lots of power for the ruling elite, and as close to zero power as possible for the individual, because the individual is an idiot, and he needs a lot of social engineering, from careful scrutiny of mothers who pack lunches for their kids to how many guns a person may own, if any.

I don't like either word, myself, because they both sound too good.  I think we need to go back to TR for the right word.  He was fond of saying "bully" all the time — I know he didn't use it with its current meaning, but it's just too wonderful a coincidence to pass up.  So let's call this philosophy of big government, social-engineering, regulate-everybody smug arrogance by a name that really describes them.  They are bullies, and their political philosophy is bullyism.

Tom Sowell gives us the history of progressivism, i. e., bullyism, in three parts:

Part I
Part II
Part III

The Secret World of Arrietty

I snuck out today to see the first showing here of The Secret World of Arrietty. (I can do that — I'm retired.) It was thoroughly beautiful.  You can't go wrong with Miyazaki.

My rule of thumb for judging children's movies is whether adults can endure watching them or not.  If not, they're probably not worth having kids watch them either.  Too dumb for adults, too dumb for kids in my judgment. And that goes for books, too. If you get hold of some book you read when you were a kid and you can't enjoy reading it, it was probably a waste of you time when you were a kid, too, no matter what you thought of it at the time.  But I digress.

Like I say, you can't go wrong with Miyazaki.  All of his stuff is beautiful. Here, he's taken a good old children's story and made it into a much bigger thing.  Just in case you don't know, Borrowers are little people, human beings except for their size, which seems to be about three to six inches tall in the movie. They've been living alongside us forever, often in our houses, under the floors and inside the walls, and they're called "Borrowers" because they subsist on things they borrow, so to speak.  Little bits of this and that, food, thimbles, safety pins, spools of thread, just enough to get by on. And of course they have to remain hidden from human eyes in order to survive.

This particular story centers around Arrietty, an only child who is thirteen going on fourteen, and she's about to do her first "borrowing," or leaving the nest to see what she can find in the human household that the Borrower family can use for survival.  So, natch, it's a species of a coming of age story. And, as you might have guessed, the Borrower "Prime Directive," which states that no Borrower may allow himself to be seen by a human being, is the crux of the plot. But you'll get no further spoilers from me.
Now, this was a natural for Miyazaki. He's good at two things especially — pointing out the beauty of both natural and man-made things, which is sort of a Japanese specialty anyway, and creating the most realistic and downright lovable kids you can find in all of literature. If you can watch this without coming to love Arrietty, there's something wrong with you. As for beauty, this movie is worth watching just to see the raindrops running down leaves.  I'm not exaggerating.

By the way, if nobody told you, you could almost watch this without realizing that it's supposed to be taking place in Japan.  There are only a half-dozen clues to tell you that it is. But outside the obvious clues, it clearly has a Japanese sensibility, most especially in recognizing the universal beauty in everything that I mentioned above.

It's been forever since I've read the books, though I remember enjoying them as a kid, so I can't tell you how much the plot varies from the original story, but the spirit is certainly still there, and is actually expanded into something much more profound than in the original.  Frankly, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the story on the one hand, and the loveliness of the animation on the other.  Old Walt Disney realized a long time ago that animation was potentially a form of high art, and Miyazaki has proven him right.

Click on this to see it animated.

Classifying this as a children's animated movie is technically correct, but it's like calling Crime and Punishment a "detective story." It's a little misleading to classify it that way, because it doesn't have the annoying things you've come to expect from such movies.  It doesn't have any characters who are comically stupid, no all-powerful villain, no sexual innuendo attenuated to make it acceptable for children, and most important of all.... No Eddie Murphy.

Go see it. You'll love it.  Then go get Miyazaki's other stuff and watch it. Here's the trailer:

More on Pat Buchanan

Yesterday I blogged about how the wretches at MSNBC fired Pat Buchanan. It occurs to me that I probably have a lot of young (by comparison) readers who really don't remember the peak of Buchanan's life in 1992, when he tried for the Republican nomination, but lost out to the incumbent, George Bush I. And if they don't remember that, they most likely don't realize how big an impact Buchanan has had in our politics and culture.  He's been fighting a rear-guard action against the forces of decadence and deterioration all his life. I recommend that you head for the library and read all his books, simple as that.  The latest, Suicide of a Superpower, pictured here, was evidently the straw that broke the camel's back as far as his employment at MSNBC is concerned.  Too patriotic, or something.  You can find all his books HERE, or probably at any decent public library.  And Newt thinks he's a historian.  It is to laugh.

And maybe the high point in 1992 was Pat's speech at the Republican convention.  He overpraises George Bush, of course, but it was in aid of defeating Bill Clinton, so we can certainly give him a pass on that.  Elvisnixon has posted it HERE.  Go take a look.

Gutless Swine at MSNBC Fire Pat Buchanan

Well, the left-wing scum out there have finally prevailed upon MSNBC to fire Pat Buchanan.  If there was every any reason to watch that network, it's gone now, unless you enjoy watching thrills run up and down Christ Matthews' leg. They have kowtowed to the Zeitgeist that insists that some issues just have no place in the discussion. Pat has a lot of opinions, most of which I share, and none of which, apparently, meet the exalted standards set by our Neocon/Liberal masters. Immigration is off the table, unless you're an advocate of open borders. American nationalism is likewise taboo, unless it's in the interests of various other countries.

Typical of the left (yes, the neocons are leftists), they call for free and open discussion, while doing everything in their power, from economic and political pressure to downright thuggery, to silence any dissent.  They call gentle old Pat every name in the book from racist to nazi to homophobe, while insisting on "civility" from their opponents.  The irony is that Pat is excruciatingly civil all the time. Pat himself has deconstructed the witch-hunt perpetrated against him, and, you guessed it, he's civil about it. Read it HERE in the American Conservative.

And an aside:  Did you notice the cover illustration at the American Conservative site?  It's Ron Paul, but  I could swear it's Jean-Luc Picard in a hairpiece.  Is it just me, or does it look that way to you, too?

You can also read Pat's column HERE.

Christ Christie Desecrates the Flag Again.

I never had much respect for Christ Christie, the Tony Soprano of the Republican Party, and now it's gone down to zero.  Was he afraid Al Sharpton would slap him around, or what? Now he's ordered the flag lowered for Whitney Houston, and to hell with the troops.  They can't sing.  In the first place, Whitney Houston has never done anything at all that I know of heroic or patriotic.  In the second place, she was a pretty reprehensible human being.  If you hadn't heard about all that, just read Nicholas Stix. Or listen to the often irritating, but sometimes correct, Bill O'Reilly.

Of course, this is all about sucking up to Black dysfunctionality.  The White liberals in charge of just about everything prefer to deify people like Houston and Michael Jackson, and pointedly ignore the Blacks who have accomplished things without being dysfunctional.  White liberals, you see, want the gratitude of their pet African-Americans, and guys like Tom Sowell or Bill Cosby or Alan West don't owe them any gratitude, because they did what they did without the cloying paternalism of White liberals.

But junkies/crazies like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson sure as hell did need the guidance and help of White liberals, and they are therefore worthy of all kinds of sucking up from them.  Even if they don't express any gratitude, the White liberals can feel all warm and fuzzy because they know that the poor child-like knuckleheads could never have made it without the wonderful paternalism of earnest, idealistic White liberals protecting them and helping them along through the horrible gauntlet of White racism.

And Christ Christie has polished his credentials.  He is, undisputably, a White liberal.

Illegal Immigration Again

Cartoon from BALOO'S WEBSITE

The world is full of good things, but they're not always located in the right place.  That's what pollution is all about, really. Perfectly benign stuff that is in the wrong place.  Gum wrappers are great when they're wrapped around gum, but not so great when they're blowing around in the parking lot.  Water is great stuff.  We need it and would die without it, but sometimes it floods and kills people. Dirt, just the thing for growing food, is not good at all when it's on the living room carpet or clogging your carburetor. Petroleum is absolutely necessary for a number of things, but we've all heard about oil spills. Living things are the same way.  Bees are, I understand, necessary for the ecology, but they're no good when they get inside your car. We make great efforts to reintroduce wolves in certain areas in order to ensure a wildlife balance, but we don't want them walking around downtown. This is even true within a house.  I have a dog who is great, but I don't want him in the bedroom or the office because those places have things I don't want him chewing on.

Have I established the principle?  All these things — gum wrappers, water, oil, dogs, etc. — aren't intrinsically bad things, and indeed are wonderful and desirable things in the right place, but when they're in the wrong place, we have a problem.  So when you don't want a gum wrapper or a dog in a certain place, it's not fair to call you a gumwrapper bigot or an anti-canite.

This applies to people, too.  The guy down the street is a good guy, and you like him, and he's fun to talk to or go bowling with, but when you come home and find him unexpectedly in your bathtub, you don't like it.  You don't object to him qua him, as Ayn Rand would say, but you do object to his location.  You can think of lots of examples yourself, I'm sure.  Men are unwelcome in the ladies' room, and vice-versa. Kids under a certain age shouldn't be sitting at the bar. Jehovah's Witnesses can't live in a nunnery.

And, all of us divide the human race into two groups — people we have invited into our home, and people we haven't.  That last bunch we really don't want to find in the bathtub. That's why we keep the door locked.

So, finally, I get to illegal aliens.  Legal aliens, be they immigrants or temporary residents, are people we have collectively invited into our home.  The illegals, by definition, we haven't.  And, like the guy down the street, they might be terrific folks, but they haven't been invited.  And that trumps everything else.  Now, some of them, maybe we should invite.  That's up to us to decide, though, as a nation, and while we have a right to change our minds, nobody has the right to ignore our will and behave as though we had invited them.  And millions have done just that.  It has nothing to do with their intrinsic worth, you see — it has to do with our right as a nation to determine who gets in.  And a right you don't claim soon gets lost in the shuffle.  It's time to claim that right back. And lock the door.

Other nations seem to take their own rights more seriously than we do.  Just try to sneak into, say, South Korea or Mexico illegally.  See what happens.

There are a lot of incentives out there for illegals to come in without an invitation, and if we want them to stop, it's time to cut the incentives off.  There are all kinds of illegals out there, some nice, some not so nice, but they're all crashing the party, and we have to make it clear that it's our house and not the property of the whole human race.

As for incentives, Fred Reed describes one class of illegals and how powerful the pressure is on them to enter.  His essay is HERE.

Birth Control and Overpopulation

I remember back when I was a kid and you heard all about what a problem overpopulation was. That was when there were actually billions fewer people on Earth than there are now.  But you really don't hear that much about overpopulation. On the contrary, we're often told, here in the US and Western Europe, that we don't have enough people and we have to import millions more from the Third World or everything will fall apart.  Well, what happened is that the propaganda worked.  The whole purpose of scaring us about overpopulation was to get people in the advanced part of the world to cut its birth rate. There was little concern about the Third World population explosion.  Well, that advanced part of the world is now reproducing so little that it's actually shrinking in population.  And what we're talking about, really, is the White race plus Japan.  The people in the world most responsible for order and civilization are disappearing — mission accomplished.

It's interesting that birth control, usually including abortion, was once the great weapon in the fight against overpopulation.  Back when liberals were semi-sane, they especially wanted nonWhites to use birth control, not because they didn't like nonWhites, but because they were obviously reproducing so fast that they had no hope of raising themselves out of poverty unless they limited their family size. Also, of course Whites had already limited their family size, for the most part, so they didn't need to have birth control urged on them.  But now such talk is racism, a species of thoughtcrime.  So if you want anybody, White or nonWhite, rich or poor, to use birth control, you have to couch the whole discussion in terms of "Women 's Rights," a new liberal superstition.

So when the neocons who like to make a fuss about this sort of thing want to annoy liberal advocates of birth control/abortion, they needle them with the fact that it means fewer nonWhites, especially fewer Blacks, and that means that, unlike the angelic neocons, liberals are racist!  As delightful as it is to have the term backfire on liberals, it makes the neocons look like the morons they are, because they seem to be saying that we don't have enough nonWhites wallowing in poverty, and good conservatives should want more and more of them.  Idiots.

Interestingly, some nonWhites, like the Chinese, have realized that reasonable limits on family size is actually good for them, and have taken steps to accomplish it.  On the other hand, liberal Whites, who for generations have reproduced at a reasonable rate, have decided to self-destruct, and reproduce below replacement level, and basically wreck their own civilization.  Suicide-prone, they think we should dwindle in order to make room for the population explosion from the Third World.  To use a word that liberals like to use in other connections, that's not "sustainable," is it?

Well, this connection between birth control/abortion and the unmentioned overpopulation issue, with its added racial dimension, should be obvious, but most of us miss it.  Steve Sailer hasn't missed it, though.  His essay on the subject is HERE.

Syria — Any of our business?

It's not true to say that violence never solves anything — it actually solves a lot of things. But it doesn't follow at all that it's a solution to everything. We have been invading various countries all over the Middle East, roughly speaking, ever since the First Gulf War, and undoubtedly these invasions have had results.  Whether you can call them solutions is debatable.  Clearly, any evil that Saddam Hussein was perpetrating is no longer being perpetrated, but what's the result in sum?  Is there less evil there now, or more? Even the neocons in charge of all this, if pinned down, will have to admit that in some ways, the Iraqis are worse off than they were, but the neocons maintain that in sum, again, they're actually better off.  And that can be debated. It can also be debated, of course, whether US interests were furthered or harmed by the whole thing.  Now that Libya isn't in the news, it's kind of hard to tell whether things have improved there or not, but no matter, the new Big Thing in the News is Syria, and the talking heads assure us that this Assad guy is so utterly evil that we should arm the rebels in Syria to help overthrow him.

Now, if you're honest about it, you'll admit that there really aren't any nice governments in the Arab world.  By Western standards, they're all tyrannical and medieval, okay?  Some clearly worse than others, of course. So it's very easy to make a case for overthrowing any of them, because they're all controlled by bad guys.  The hell of it is, when overthrown, they're all too likely to be replaced by equally bad, if not worse, guys, after the usual bloodbath.  Then it's back to business as usual.

Pat Buchanan has been thinking about this sort of thing longer than I have.  His opinion on the matter is HERE.

Neutralize Newt!

From the ATLANEA THE BEAUTIFUL BLOG.
(click to enlarge)

There are a lot of things wrong with Romney and Santorum, but really, you'd have to pool their flaws to even get close to Newt's amazing collection of defects. The cute thing is that he's pretending to be some kind of conservative. He's not, okay?  Even within the expanded definition that the neocons have imposed upon the term.  Now, Newt talks about how he has a lot of ideas, and that's certainly true. I actually like and endorse his idea for offering prizes to people for technological advances, like his moon base.  He did, however, get these ideas from his obviously broad reading in Science Fiction, and most especially from Jerry Pournelle.  And that's okay. Statesmen should read broadly, and get good ideas from other people. The problem with Newt is that, along with his good ideas, he also has some horribly bad ideas.  Immigration, for example.  When you deconstruct his non-amnesty ideas, you easily conclude that they amount to, well, amnesty. And Newt himself admits that hanging around on a couch with Nancy Pelosi wasn't a great idea.  He also has the popular bad idea that cruising around the world righting everybody's wrongs is America's responsibility. That kind of stuff costs trillions and kills a lot of Americans.  Sorry Newt.  And his Foney and Fraudie association is as bad as anything any Democrat ever came up with.

Newt should do us and himself a favor and drop out and collaborate on some more science-fiction novels.  He's pretty good at that.  Elvisnixon elaborates HERE.

Best of a Bad Bunch?

Cartoon from BALOO'S WEBSITE.

I've been saying for years that Jack Kennedy was the best of a bad bunch, what with his bootlegger dad, and ratlike brother Bobby, and of course Teddy the Hutt. But now we have new revelations about what a sexual sleazeball the Skipper was. I think we consider him better than his brothers mainly because he's from the previous era, where there was a limit to just how bad you could  be, politically. Most of Jack Kennedy's leftist nonsense is now a part of mainstream conservatism, if you've noticed, with government activism in every field from socialism to civil rights.

But even though we've lived through the Lewinski thing, and the Weiner thing, and the Barney Frank thing, etc. etc., we're still a little off-put by the sheer arrogance and abuse of power revealed by the Alford book.  Most of us, anyway.  But remember the Obama acolyte, Chris Matthews?  Well, Chris is torn between two gods, sort of.  Or maybe JFK is just one of Chris's trinity, you know, Obama, Churchill, and Kennedy.  Bill and Hillary, in Chris's theology, are sort of sidetracked off to the status of really important saints, instead of actual gods.

Kathy Shaidle explores the catacombs of Chris's brain HERE.

Michelle's Secret

Not like Victoria's Secret.  Au contraire. This shocking truth is exposed by the "Irish Savant" HERE.

Blundering into a New Crusade?

Cartoon from BALOO'S WEBSITE.

Anybody know what's going on in Syria?  Fighting, sure, but do you know what it's all about? Are the people demanding freedom and democracy or what?  What are Syrians, anyway?  Mostly Muslims, I guess, but Sunnis or Shias? (No peeking, now.) This is a different Assad, isn't it?  The old guy's kid, if I remember right. Do they have Christians there?  Growing up in my home town in Indiana, I remember a lot of "Syrians" who were Christians, so did they all leave and come here?

Big question: Do you know enough about Syria to agree with the pundits that we (the United States) have to do something about it? Me, now, I know enough about it to know that the wise guys in the Government (and the wise guys who want to be in the Government) can't possibly know any clear way to improve the situation, or, even, if it ought to be improved.

I do know that knocking out a stable government in the Third World almost always results in a bigger mess, with more bloodshed and agony, than the status quo ante. And that when we help with the knocking out, we gain a few hundred thousand new enemies, quite often the same "freedom fighters" that we help put into power. Remember how we used to be pals with Saddam Hussein?  And the Taliban?

Well, for those of us who just don't have time to keep up with these things. Taki summarizes the situation.

Dumping on the Troops

It's dump on the troops again, people. This time is Marines in Afghanistan, being given a hard time for this photo. Nothing like a bunch of pencil neck draft dodgers bitching about what military people do. Note that they haven't committed any crimes, burned any flags, or done anything treasonous, which is more than you can say for the creeps dumping on them for this. Where to start?  In the first place, the use of the SS runes to stand for Marine Scout-Snipers is nothing new.  Been going on for awhile. I first heard about it years ago. Military men like such symbols. They show an affinity with historical military units, famous and infamous. Military men admire their opponents, and honor them by using their symbols in this way. Civilians don't understand stuff like this.  To them, the military is just a bunch of peons for them to order around. This really pisses me off, if you haven't noticed.

And, for that matter, exactly what are the Marines and the rest of our military forces doing in the Middle East? At the very least, shielding Israel from its enemies, and it's fair to say that they're fighting Israel's battles in their place.  Really, does our government give a damn about the fate of any other people in the Middle East?  Hardly.  It's all about Israel.  You can tell that from how the Presidential candidates fall all over each other assuring Israel and the Israel-Firsters here of their "staunch support" for Israel.

So not only are our troops required to put their lives on the line for Israel, they're also supposed to be excruciatingly politically correct about it, and bend over backwards to not accidentally offend the professional offense-takers. You can read all about this HERE in the "Daily Mail." Especially note this quote:

‘Heads need to roll and this needs to be fully investigated,’ said Mikey Weinstein, of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in Washington D.C. ‘This is a complete and total outrage.’


Now, I Googled Mikey and his foundation, and found THIS.  A better name would be the Military Anti-Christian Foundation, eh? Note that he blames the Fort Hood shootings not on the psycho who did the shooting, but on Christian Fundamentalists. Muslim craziness is just fine with Mikey.  He likes to accuse people of "Islamophobia" and "anti-Semitism."

His website says that he's fighting for our troops' rights.  But, evidently, not their right to take such pictures or think forbidden thoughts.  For that, they must be punished.  And it's not just the regular enlisted guys.  He enjoys crushing generals, too.

Multiculturalism

From THE DAILY KENN

Pat Buchanan, a Retrospective

Before the current Ron Paul revolt, the last time anybody challenged the wussy me-too Republican establishment was the Pat Buchanan candidacy. If it were up to me, it would be Pat running right now instead of Ron Paul, because Pat's message is less ambiguous. While Ron Paul has a pretty wonderful understanding of economics and foreign policy from an ideological point of view, Pat has pretty much the same understanding but is also clearly culturally aware. Go read what they've both written and you'll see what I mean.

Pat understands two principles which I like to call the principles of Libertarian Nationalism.  The first is that the United States (or any country) is what it is because of the people who make it up.  It's not geography or the Constitution.  The geography is largely irrelevant, and the Constitution came from the people, it didn't create the people.  And the people of the United States are, basically, derived from the people of North-West Europe, most particularly the British people.  That's where we got our culture and our political thinking.  Now, I don't mean that we got these things from Europe, I mean that we are a branch of Europe and these things are intrinsic in us. Pat understands this, but sometimes I wonder if Ron Paul does.  All too often, I fear that he, like others, thinks that we're a propositional nation instead of a nation that invented a proposition.

The second principle Pat understands is that our foreign policy should be determined by our interests and nothing else.  I went into this more fully awhile ago HERE. This thinking is totally out of fashion, of course, and we are fighting all around the world now, in theory, to make the world better for the people of Afghanistan, Kosovo, Israel, etc. etc. etc., and not for the people of America.

You don't find anything remotely resembling these principles in the words of Romney, Santorum, or Gingrich, and certainly not Obama.  What Ron Paul says does resemble these principles, and that's why I support him.

And now there's a book out about the Life of Pat Buchanan — The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous times of Pat Buchanan, by Timothy Stanley.  It's reviewed by John Derbyshire HERE.

The Tradition of Multiculturalism

CARTOON FROM BALOO'S WEBSITE

There's nothing new about this "multiculturalism" garbage.  The elite is delighted when savage "refugees" are admitted to the country and go on welfare and start criminal gangs, and this tradition goes back at least as far as LBJ and his treasonous revision of immigration laws. The motivation ranges from pure evil on the part of politicians, who simply want an irresponsible population eternally dependent on government largesse, to sappy people who think that Christianity demands that they adopt babies from the Third World.

But imagine my surprise at learning that explicit multiculturalism in politics goes all the way back to Wendell Wilkie.  Woodrow Wilson, for all his flaws, did believe that by and large, ethnic groups should rule themselves, and not be crammed into countries where they don't fit.  But within a couple of decades, that reasonable attitude had turned into the opposite.  Wendell Wilkie, if you'll remember, was one of those Republicans who are basically Democrats — You know, the kind the Republican Party keeps nominating for President. Anyhow, Willkie enlisted help from good old Joe Stalin to promote multiculturalism in Germany, in order, of course, to destroy and neutralize it.  And now, our politicians are doing it to us, having tested the technique in Europe.

Anyhow, I learned about this from the good old "Irish Savant" HERE.

The Colorado Caucuses

I went to the Colorado Caucuses last night. Interesting in a boring sort of way. A very nice collection of people, as you might suspect. I was clearly the flakiest-looking person there. The guy in charge was a Romney supporter, and he gave a nice short speech extolling Mitt's virtues, most especially as a vetoer of bad legislation in Massachusetts. Nobody wanted to speak for Newt (I said it was a nice collection of people.), and one guy spoke up for Santorum.  I was about to speak for Ron Paul, despite my flaky appearance, but a young guy who just got out of the Navy beat me to it.  He was all right, but he was talking about how Ron Paul would keep us out of war without explaining why we should keep out of war, so he didn't convince anybody.  The vote total ended up with Santorum beating Romney by ten votes, Ron Paul a distant third, and Newt got hardly any votes at all.  One guy voted for Rick Perry.

And we all know how Colorado ended up, as well as Missouri and Minnesota.  I have mixed feelings. Here's my evaluation so far:

Ron Paul is obviously the only one of the group who should be President, but I wish he'd talk slower and explain himself better.  He keeps saying "liberty," and most Americans don't know what that means any more. You have to explain it.

Newt is a lying sack of unmentionable. If some guy on the street tells me that Romney said he "doesn't care about the poor," I dismiss it, because he probably just heard somebody else say it, and didn't hear the original exchange.  But when Newt says it, he's a damn liar and he knows it. There are a zillion valid criticisms of Romney, but Newt thought lying would be more effective.  To Hell with him. (In case you're that guy on the street, what Romney said is that he's concerned about the middle class, because the rich are just fine, and the poor have a safety net. But the middle class is getting ravaged. He said that and he was perfectly correct.)

Santorum worries me. He's one of those big-government conservatives who does indeed "talk the talk," but ends up walking with the liberals when it comes to the big spending and crusading around the world to tell everybody else what to do. When Newt says dump on Iran, he's probably lying, when Mitt says it, he clearly isn't emotional about it and is saying it because it's what you're supposed to say right now, and Ron Paul doesn't want war with Iran at all.

Now to Romney. He's a likable guy, and has clearly led his life in a responsible, moral way. (You can say the same for Santorum and Paul.) He's actually a damn good role model (as is Ron Paul), and you can be safe to tell your son to be like Romney. Interestingly, that may be his downside, electorally. People are more comfortable with wharf rats like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich these days.  I got this insight from the Master of Insights, Steve Sailer.  Read what he has to say on Romney, and his review of the new book, "The Real Romney," HERE.

War with Iran

Who wants war with Iran?  Show of hands!... Nobody?  I didn't think so. I certainly don't.  In his column this week HERE, Pat Buchanan gives us a good summary of who wants war with Iran — our friends the neocons, most of whom are proud draft-dodgers themselves, who can give you a list as long as your arm about how terrific yet another war in the Middle East would be. And other Israel-firsters, who don't think our staunch allies should have to dirty their hands fighting their own battles. I mean, what are American soldiers for, if not to defend Israel.  What are we supposed to do with them, defend our own borders or something?  That would be racist.  Well, take a couple of minutes to read Pat's column and then I'll tell you what's wrong with it.
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Okay? The whole column is dead on, as Pat's stuff almost always is — We have no evidence that the Iranians are trying to build a nuclear weapon, and if they are trying, it'll take them a good long time.  Also, from their actual behavior, it's pretty clear that the Iranians don't want a war with us or anybody else, despite assurances from Dr. Strangehammer that they're just itchin' for a fight. Moreover, yes, the current Israeli government would dearly love for us to kick hell out of Iran for them, because they find Iran annoying.  And also, of course, their US puppets desire the same. Plus the Americans who aren't exactly puppets, but who believe that, in the usual phrase, that Iran is an "existential threat to Israel."  When you get right down to it, who isn't an existential threat to Israel? The actual fact is that Israel is the strongest Middle-East nation, and even more so in terms of nuclear weapons — they have hundreds of them.

So what's wrong with Pat's column?  Only this — He seems to take Obama's word for it that he, Obama, doesn't want war with Iran. Well, in a sense that's true — What Obama wants is to swagger around and bask in admiration from Stupid White People. He doesn't give a damn about Iran one way or the other, or anything else except his own precious skinny ass. But if the people who make his decisions for him on boring old political matters tell him to get busy on a war with Iran, his feet will do their duty.

So just change one thing in the column. Let's say that Obama and the Democrats are perceived as being peaceful and reluctant to attack Iran.  That's true, and keeping that perception up is pretty easy, what with Mitt and Newt and Rick running around all over the country vowing to defend Israel to the very last American farm boy.  And since a whole lot of Americans are catching on that our adventuring around in the Middle East is useless at best and counterproductive at worst, that could just get them to vote for Obama yet again.

Remember, though, how so many of use voted for Dubya because he said "no more nation-building." We couldn't trust him, so why the hell would anybody trust Obama?

Scandinavian Liberals

What happened to the Scandinavians, anyway?  They used to be like the guy in the illustration — tough, tough-minded, aggressive, and with a very clear sense of who they were and how they differed from other people. But now they're all wimpy liberals.  This is true back in the old country, where Norway and Sweden seem to be competing in a cultural self-destruction derby, and also true with their cousins here in America.  Is it the distance paradox? The farther away from minorities that Whites live, the more tolerant they are?  I think there's some truth to that.  If you live in some lily-white place, it's easy to kid yourself that all people are basically the same, because you don't have the differences shoved in your face daily. You can make up all kinds of fantasies about equality, or, if you lack imagination, you can just get your fantasies from the MAG (Media, Academia, Government).

Nowhere is this more true than in Minnesota, where heaps of Scandinavians came to live during the last two centuries. One of the most liberal places in the country, where the local "right-wingers" are mostly evangelical-type Christians who like to run off to Haiti or someplace to adopt babies.

So if you want to run a tolerance scam, you can't do better than Minnesota.  HERE'S what's going on in Duluth.