"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." – Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
Pizzagate represents another, slightly less detectable shift, and frankly, I can’t say that this one displeases me. Indeed, I’ll make a confession: There’s a part of me—the dark, nasty part that I only allow out every now and then and only for the basest of reasons—that is taking a bit of delight in seeing the D.C. leftist elites at the center of this non-scandal having their lives turned upside down because a horde of trolls has decided to misrepresent a bunch of pictures, paintings, and flippant comments in order to spin them as proof of a “pedo” ring.
The cloddish sleuths of Pizzagate have been egged on by the fact that many of the leftist elites who hover in or around Comet Ping Pong (the “epicenter” of the supposed conspiracy) enjoy showing off how “evolved” they are by being cheeky little monkeys when it comes to mixing sexual imagery and children. “Oh, look how very progressive we are. We run a pizza shop for kids, but we book sexually explicit music acts and post violent and lewd pics on our Instagram! Look at my art collection; the sexual images of children prove how fearless I am! A night of ‘spirit cooking’ would frighten those superstitious evangelical throwbacks, but I get the joke, because I’m an impish little centaur who absolutely loves having fun with dark imagery in order to show off how non-demon-haunted my superior mind is.”
Make no mistake—these leftists, these targets of the Pizzagate gumshoes, are indeed misunderstood by their tormentors. Their “cheekiness” regarding kids, sex, Satanism, etc. is not proof of a “pedo ring”; it’s just leftists wallowing in the last remaining sty that has yet to be cleaned out by their own PC morality police. Invoking imagery of children, sex, and the “dark arts” is the only remaining bit of “edginess” they’re allowed, the only time they can playact at being Lenny Bruce. So yes, the “cheeky monkeys” of the left have been misread by a group of conspiracy-minded oafs who have queered the fun by spinning every Comet Ping Pong-related word and image into something diabolical…and I hate myself for saying this, but good. The left has been doing this to the right for years—taking every off-the-cuff comment, every word uttered in the heat of the moment, every successful or failed attempt at humor, on the part of conservatives, and spinning it to “prove” how secretly racist, sexist, and homophobic we are. What the left has done to conservatives, especially in the internet age, is Pizzagate exactly. Everything we do, everything we say, is interpreted in the worst possible way in order to paint us as vile creatures with malicious intent. With Pizzagate, some high-profile leftists are finally getting a taste of what that’s like.
Hopefully, they’ll have many more opportunities over the coming days and years to have their own bullshit crammed down their throats by the shovelful.
It’s one thing to see religious puritans destroy art, but when the artists start doing it to each other, it’s macabre. The thought police don’t even have to show up to work. We’re policing ourselves. Even the bands featured on the show have “disavowed” their association. Again, nobody has brought up what sketch they have a problem with. They’re not asked to prove anything. Once you’re a heretic, you’re done.
Liberal beta males tell the outraged few we are being crybabies and we have to accept the way the free market behaves. World Peace had higher ratings than the first season of The Eric Andre Show. I’ve heard the only show that beat it was Family Guy. Mike Lazzo had asked for another 100 episodes and the guys had begun creating them. That’s the free market. Harassing Turner executives until they demand Lazzo make the problem go away is not. If your ex-girlfriend comes storming into your office and trashes the place every day until you get fired, the guy who fires you isn’t reacting to the market. He’s reacting to the crazy bitch.
This is why the First Amendment is just as relevant in Britain and Canada as it is here. If the people—the culture—don’t want free speech, the law isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. In Canada and Britain it’s illegal to commit thought crimes. You will be bankrupted if you say something that offends the liberal narrative. In America it is perfectly legal to say whatever you want. The government won’t punish you, the people will. They’ll call your boss until you get fired. The end result is the same in both cases. I don’t care who’s doing the goose-stepping or who is carrying the truncheons. I hate Nazis. Today, the Nazis are the ones calling us Nazis.
And that loud whizzing sound you keep hearing is irony, zooming right over their empty heads.
In case you have forgotten who McMullin is (though you and most other Americans might find it impossible to forget someone you never really knew), he worked for the CIA for 10 years overseas, followed by a stint at Goldman Sachs, and then spent a few years as a House staffer until earlier this summer. He was flattered into running for president by the same brain trust that hatched a failed scheme to recruit David French, a relatively obscure writer and lawyer at National Review, for the purpose of thwarting Trump and electing Hillary Clinton. French, however, was self-respecting enough to understand when he was being taken for a fool; McMullin, not so much.
To no one’s surprise, McMullin’s candidacy was largely a sideshow, aimed at providing cover for movement conservatism in the event of the “inevitable” loss these gurus were convinced was coming for Trump. His campaign was straight out of a Christopher Buckley novel; though he evidently wasn’t in on the joke. Self-awareness is not one of McMullin’s strong suits, to say the least.
McMullin ran on the platform that if only Americans would invoke the principles of the Declaration of Independence enough, and apply them to the whole world with verve, we could solve our national problems. Never mind the hard work of connecting principles to policies that serve the common good. Statesmanship is for chumps. Simple sophistry will suffice to bind our nation’s wounds. The rednecks in Appalachia just need to quit their incessant yapping about their trials and travails and read their trusty pocket Constitutions everyday. That’ll do the trick.
At this point, McMullin has resigned himself to being a Twitter warrior, calling out Trump for everything under the sun.
McMuffin is a shameless fool, and a perfect marker for absolutely everything that’s gone wrong in this country over the last, oh, sixty years or so. As Sabo says, it’s going to be hard for Americans to forget completely about somebody they never knew about in the first place. But I’m confident that we’re up to the challenge.
Europe was warned that ISIS planned terror attacks at Christmas markets 25 days before the Berlin atrocity.
Police have said at least nine people died and more than 50 have been injured after a lorry ploughed through a Christmas market killing and injuring shoppers.
ISTANBUL — Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at an Ankara art exhibit on Monday evening by a lone Turkish gunman shouting “God is great!” and “don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!” in what the leaders of Turkey and Russia called a provocative terrorist attack.
Authorities confess themselves baffled as to any possible motive. As usual. Vox says:
Enough. It’s time to bring back Christendom and start banning religions again. The Enlightenment is not only over, it failed.
How many more people need to die for multiculturalism and diversity? Angela Merkel should be arrested and put on trial for treason.
No non-Western refugees should ever be allowed into the West for any reason. Help them there or don’t help them at all.
Amen to that. I’m still not seeing where the demand is for all these sub-literate, unskilled, unassimilable, and implacably hostile Muslim immigrants. Let them sit and rot in the countries they’ve forged into primitive hellholes forever for all me. Help them? Help them what, pray tell? Let them abandon their savage death cult and civilize themselves at long last…or let them eat sand until they choke to death on it.
Which brings us to the main point: The entire purpose of 60 years of slanted media and slanted news and slanted education and social pressure and brainwashing and deception and indoctrination — all of it, everything we complain about every day, all day, for years and years and years — the purpose of all this is to get people to vote for the most left-wing candidate in each presidential election. The goal is to bring about a self-imposed silent revolution in America, a democratically elected socialist government voted in by low-information rubes unaware of what they’re doing.
And it has looked ever since Obama’s ascendancy in 2008 that this long-term strategy had reached a tipping point of success from which there was no return — no conservative could ever win another presidential election. With each passing year, the population was getting younger, more radical, more brainwashed, etc. (Midterm/off-year elections are a somewhat different story, as regional conservative outposts could still elect local representatives — but on a national scale, they were greatly outnumbered by burgeoning young generations of leftists.)
The results of these decades of indoctrination was plainly visible in the college students of today, who are all so left-wing by default that they consider standard Marxism too old-fashioned and conservative. Taking this into consideration, and remembering that the adults of today were the radical students of the recent past, it had seemed that these decades of indoctrination had been resoundingly successful, and that the U.S. electorate had swung wildly to the left, never to swing back, just as the Gramscian brainwashers had been planning and implementing for the last 50 or more years.
Ooops
And then November 8, 2016 happened, and BOOM: It was all revealed to be a lie. Not only did the indoctrination fail, but the general impression that the relentless indoctrination had always been successful was itself a gigantic meta-deception.
All the chatter and statistics and talk show “experts” proclaiming that America had forever swung Democratic? ALL LIES.
All the slanted polls, which were intended to convince everyone that Hillary was inevitable? ALL LIES.
The derision of Trump as a ludicrous fringe candidate and his supporters as wild-eyed extremists? ALL LIES.
And it’s not just that they were all lies — they were lies that had no effect. Somehow, without anyone noticing, a majority of the American populace had evolved a new immunity to progressive disinformation.
It doesn’t even matter what Trump’s actual political beliefs are or what his policies will be. All that matters is that he was the media’s Designated Enemy and yet he won.
I’m maybe not quite so sanguine as Zombie is about the completeness and/or permanence of the victory over the Left parasites (and neither are a good few of the commenters), but you should still read all of it and draw your own conclusions—which is something you’ll never, ever hear a Leftard say, at least. The last couple of paragraphs are especially cheering.
Inside the ring, Shad Gaspard was one half of WWE’s “Cryme Tyme,” a painfully off-color caricature of two scheming street hustlers who delighted in throwing dice, stealing cars and “robbing white people.”
His rallying cry: “Money, money — yeah, yeah.”
Outside the ring, Gaspard is, unsurprisingly, not a criminal. He’s a passionate actor, one who waxes poetic about Sidney Poitier’s performance in “A Raisin in the Sun” and artfully recites Shakespeare’s “Henry V” on command.
On Saturday night, in a strange collision of irony and circumstance, the former violence-glorifying wrestler added another role to his growing demo reel: Crime fighter.
This time, however, as Gaspard stepped inside the impromptu ring that was a Valero station in Coral Springs, Fla., the 35-year-old was playing himself — all 6 feet 7 and 285 pounds of him.
His real-life opponent: Jason Felix of North Lauderdale, Fla.
Height: 5 feet 8.
Weight: 140 pounds.
Chance of wining: Zero.
The lowlife tried robbing the wrestler, waved a pistol in his face…and got what he had coming:
“Fearing he was about to be robbed, the victim lunged at the defendant and grabbed the weapon in an attempt to disarm him,” police say.
The daring defensive tactic worked. The confrontation, captured on store surveillance cameras, occurred in seconds and seemed to end with Gaspard retrieving the weapon, calmly walking toward the front of the store and placing the gun on the clerk’s counter.
But Gaspard wasn’t finished with his opponent. (No compelling wrestling match is complete without a climactic smackdown, after all.)
Police say the Gaspard “grabbed” Felix and “escorted him outside where he was eventually detained on the ground with the help of witnesses.”
Authorities are being polite.
Surveillance footage shows Gaspard walking Felix outside, with his massive forearm wrapped around the suspect’s neck. The two men pause momentarily and then, without warning, Felix’s feet leave the ground as Gaspard body-slams him to the ground like a rag doll.
Though the recording is silent, one can imagine a crowd cheering right about then.
One of the best lines I’ve read all year. Two more great ones from the same column (in the WaPo, of all places!): “I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.” And, from a co-blogger: “When you find yourself in the Supreme Court adverse to the Little Sisters of the Poor you might consider whether maybe you have pushed a little too far.”
But they won’t consider any such thing. They can’t. When have they ever? They’re determined that all must knuckle under to the project of creating New Progressive Man—even the Little Sisters. Otherwise, it won’t work right, see.
And of course there was more to Trump’s big win than just that. But liberal overreach and arrogance certainly played a big part in pushing people who maybe didn’t like or trust Trump much over the line into thinking long and hard about what giving the Left four more years of free reign would mean, given the damage they’d done already in the last eight. And in the end, liberalism crippled itself. It is an ideology based on absolute tyranny by supposed “experts” who turn out not to be entirely competent or trustworthy after all. Quite the opposite, in fact. And after a solid half-century of very nearly uninterrupted Progressivist rule and Republican collaboration and capitulation, then eight years of the pure blushful hippocrene itself, too many of us now know it.
Think of it: our once-mighty economy is down for the count. Traditional families are mocked and scorned. Our daughters must now share bathrooms with sad, delusional perverts. Any public expression of Christian faith is forbidden, while Islam is sacrosanct and may not be criticized in any way. Our cities are wracked by riots originally inspired by a blatant lie about a lowlife, worthless black thug with murderous intent. Cops are being shot by snipers because of this same lie. The most advanced health care system in the world has been taken over by a bunch of fools who can’t even build a working website to promote the sordid mess. Absolutely everywhere you turn, a too-powerful government is in your pocket and telling you what you may and may not do. Everything not mandatory is forbidden. God help anyone trying to start a small business, once the cornerstone of the American Dream; why on earth would anyone waste their time, energy, and money on such a hopeless and foolish endeavor?
The people responsible for building and maintaining the most prosperous, powerful, and generous nation in world history are defied, ostracized, and vilified as the source of the world’s ills. Through propaganda disseminated through the public schools, their very children have been turned against them, and the true history of the country is dismissed in favor of collectivist brainwashing.
Even the normal and natural fluctuations of the planetary climate, influenced way more by the sun and its activity (or lack thereof) than it ever was or will be by carbon dioxide, has been turned into a weapon to be used against Middle America. For God’s sake, don’t let them find out you might not be all that conscientious or careful about recycling. Boy, will THAT ever cost ya.
In the end, what cost liberalism the election was…liberalism. They’ve very nearly literally turned the world upside down; words now mean their opposite, and Orwell has become not a stark warning but a how-to guide. Tolerance means intolerance; freedom is slavery; war is peace; lies are “truth”; weakness, strength. My God, now they’re even trying to blame Trump for bombing he had nothing whatsoever to do with.
Thankfully, it turns out there are still a lot of us who don’t wish to have the government run our lives for us. The Left thought they were further along with the project than they were; how frustrating it must be for them to learn otherwise with the repudiation this election was—evidence for which can be found just about everywhere, from women chopping off their hair and uglying themselves up, to all sorts of people shamelessly allowing themselves to be seen in public weeping and trembling with despair, to childish riots and vandalism. Could there possibly BE anything more pathetic than the carrying-on of these pampered, self-indulgent little shits?
And now they’re going to have to start over and get to work on disguising their motives and intentions from decent Americans again. Just when they thought it was safe to be more or less open about their totalitarian, anti-American desire for tyranny, they get a smackdown like this. It must sting quite a bit. In fact, their usual redefinition of terms has already begun, with their risible insistence that the electoral college was established to…well, see for yourself:
As you know, the Founding Fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is ‘to an eminent degree, endowed with the requisite qualifications.’
Umm. No. No, not hardly. The Founders built the electoral college to safeguard against a fucked-up mess of a state like California deciding elections for the rest of us—to prevent us from being enslaved by a tyranny of the majority, to allow small states to have some say in their own governance. This graphic explains it pretty damned well:
That right there is just about the most powerful argument for not just keeping the electoral college but treasuring it that I can think of.
But their reaction to all this is predictable; their reliance on subterfuge, redefinition of terms, and raw deceit is no surprise. And as soon as they stop crying and get back to plotting, they’re going to get very, very busy indeed. For starters, anybody want to place any bets on them starting to call themselves “Constitutionalists” or some such, usurping it as they did the honorable old name “liberal”? Which, of course they will if they think it will work. Liberalism means never having to say you’re sorry or otherwise admit error, after all. And it also means never, ever giving up or backing off.
Count on it: tantrums, insults, and public displays of insanity notwithstanding, they’ll be back. They’ll ALWAYS be back. They’ve become too accustomed to having their way for it to be otherwise.
Okay, while I’m hipping y’all to some good Christmas tunes, might as well share one of my all-time favorites:
From 1939, Kay Kaiser. Can’t explain just why, but I totally love this song. Maybe it’s all those ting-a-ling-a-lings. I mean, come on, what’s not to like?
But I tell you folks, if I have to hear limousine liberal Bruce Springsteen moaning and groaning his way through Santa Claus Is Coming To Town one more time like a sick hound, I am gonna kill something. There’s a tune in there somewhere, Bruce; please do us all a favor and find it, all right? Lord knows you’ve meandered around it enough. Ugh.
Look for this post to be updated for the next little while, until I get tired and go to bed. I’ma go find you guys some good Christmas music, I promise I am.
Update the First! The greatest of all possible versions of this one, which is also one of my favorites.
Just classic. Shall I play for you? Why yes. Yes, you shall.
Update the Second! Another favorite of mine, and the most perfect version I know of. Don’t say I never gave y’all nothing.
Update the Third!One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard in my life, from wonderfully eccentric guitar genius John Fahey. I can’t find a version of this to embed that even comes close to this one, so you’ll just have to trust me and hit the link. I promise you won’t regret it. I attempted this one once onstage in New York, and failed miserably. But I play it at home all the time, and every once in a rare while I get it very nearly right.
Update the Fourth! Another of my favorites. And I mean, come on guys. It’s Sinatra.
Nicely done, Frank. Would that all these present-day hacks had the good taste to just sing the damned song straight, without all the warbling, meandering, self-indulgent discant crap they’re apparently compelled to throw in for some reason.
Update the Fifth! Pretty sure I’ve presented this one here before, but what the hell. How do you go wrong with Canadian Brass? You can’t, that’s how. If this one doesn’t make you smile, well dammit, I can’t help you.
And one more from Canadian Brass. Because, that’s why.
Finally, probably my most-loved Christmas carol of them all: Silent Night, impeccably done by Chanticleer. Just gorgeous. Again: if you don’t like this, well, I can’t help you.
So far past gorgeous you can’t even see gorgeous from here.
One last update! Oh, and I don’t care a whit what Rush may say: Mannheim Steamroller? Trans-Siberian Orchestra? No. Just…NO. Not now, not ever. Call me old-fashioned, call me a stick in the mud, but I prefer my Christmas music way less sinister-sounding and without synthesizers and laser light shows, thanks.
Hey, anybody remember when we were all pointing out that Hillary’s pathetic, manifestly insecure home-brew server was not only illegal according to State Department rules but amounted to a stupidly open invitation to EXACTLY the kind of hacking the Democrat Socialists are now using as an excuse to undermine Trump’s clear mandate—and the self-same people who just loved them some Russia back when it was the Soviet Union were pooh-poohing it as no big deal?
The wisdom of the Founders never ceases to amaze. For a bunch of hate-filled, patriarchal old white guys, they sure knew their stuff.
Madison explains that if administrative centralization replaces local state governments, it will expand the prerogatives of the executive and render the people’s voice silenced and their consent reduced to a mere choice of administrators. He goes on to write that, though an administrative consolidation in the United States would be ruinous to liberty, the success of the federal republic depended on a consolidation of “interests and affections.” For the Founders, such common interests included the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, signed by representatives from all the states, that imply a right to self-government and genuine consent. Moreover, such common affections are necessary, Madison writes, to “consolidate their defence of the public liberty.” So what is needed is a consolidation of interest in and affection for self-government, consent, and liberty — not greater efficiency through centralization.
We have had sufficient evidence during the last eight years that there is a growing divide and breakdown of common interests and affections in the United States. The left seems to have been quite successful at replacing the idea of a common good, especially justice, with the idea of identity politics and opposing goods with its concomitant form of “social” justice. We have also had sufficient evidence of the attempt to centralize everything from immigration to education to bathrooms in the hands of the executive branch. But it is only with this election that we now see proof of an actual desire from the left to do away with states completely and a belief that states as intermediary powers are not pillars of support to liberty but actually anachronistic obstructions to it.
Montesquieu first articulated the modern idea of federalism as a fortification for liberty, and his thoughts greatly influenced both sides of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate. Less than fifty years after American founding, Alexis de Tocqueville described what administrative centralization — without the check of intermediary powers like states — had been doing to liberty in France and would certainly do in America also if allowed; he famously described the effect that it had on the citizenry as “soft” despotism. No matter how dear or how sweet greater efficiency may seem to the consolidationists, they can only be purchased at the price of the chains of bureaucracy and administrative slavery.
To the plethora of hindsight explanations for the recent election of Donald Trump, I will add mine. In the 1790s, Madison and other Democratic-Republicans worried that the American people were losing their ability to govern themselves and were instead being ruled by a cadre of Federalist elites. The election of Thomas Jefferson, the “Revolution of 1800,” put these fears largely to rest, along with the viable existence of the Federalists as a political party. Whether rightly or wrongly time will tell, but the American people have spoken in this election, and they have declared that they will not be ruled by an oligarchy of elitists and an administrative state that calls injustice justice. Donald Trump is no Thomas Jefferson, but we should take comfort in the fact that large portions of the American people are apparently as liberty-loving today as they were in 1800. A Trump presidency may prove to be just as prone to federal overreach as Obama’s, but one thing the left and the right need to understand is that a robust form of federalism is one of the best ways to limit the prerogatives of the executive by retaining to the states the powers granted to them by the Constitution.
Madison finishes “Consolidation” with a call for those who lean on either side of the confederate/national divide to work together “to maintain the various authorities established by our complicated system,” for he knew that liberty was in both of their interests. Writing in 1792, Madison proclaimed, “partitions and internal checks of power” can never be “the chief palladium of constitutional liberty.” The primary guardians of the republic must be the people, its authors, and “their eyes must be ever ready to mark, their voice to pronounce, and their arm to repel or repair aggressions on the authority of their constitutions.” As the people acted through their states to create the federal government, so also they must act through their states to control it.
There are some in the liberty movement who bash the Constitution as a flawed document because it supposedly “failed” to safeguard our rights and our freedom. I’ve always felt the failure was not in our Constitution but in ourselves. Gratified to see that Madison agreed with me on that.
No one can think clearly or sensibly about this vast and burning topic without in the first instance making up his mind upon the fundamental issue. Does he value the State above the citizen, or the citizen above the State? Does a government exist for the individual, or do individuals exist for the government?
In the United States, also, economic crisis has led to an extension of the activities of the Executive and to the pillorying, by irresponsible agitators, of certain groups and sections of the population as enemies of the rest. There have been efforts to exalt the power of the central government and to limit the rights of individuals. It has been sought to mobilize behind this reversal of the American tradition, at once the selfishness of the pensioners, or would-be pensioners, of Washington, and the patriotism of all who wish to see their country prosperous once more.
It is when passions and cupidities are thus unleashed and, at the same time, the sense of public duty rides high in the hearts of all men and women of good will that the handcuffs can be slipped upon the citizens and they can be brought into entire subjugation to the executive government. Then they are led to believe that, if they will only yield themselves, body, mind and soul, to the State, and obey unquestioningly its injunctions, some dazzling future of riches and power will open to them…
I take the opposite view. I hold that governments are meant to be, and must remain, the servants of the citizens; that states and federations only come into existence and can only by justified by preserving the ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the homes and families of individuals. The true right and power rest in the individual. He gives of his right and power to the State, expecting and requiring thereby in return to receive certain advantages and guarantees. I do not admit that an economic crisis can ever truly be compared with the kind of struggle for existence by races constantly under primordial conditions. I do not think that modern nations in time of peace ought to regard themselves as if they were the inhabitants of besieged cities, liable to be put to the sword or led into slavery if they cannot make good their defense.
Socialism or overweening State life, whether in peace or war, is only sharing miseries and not blessings. Every self-respecting citizen in every country must be on his guard lest the rulers demand of him in time of peace sacrifices only tolerable in a period of war for national self-preservation.
I judge the civilization of any community by simple tests. What is the degree of freedom possessed by the citizen or subject? Can he think, speak and act freely under well-established, well-known laws? Can he criticize the executive government? Can he sue the State if it has infringed his rights? Are there also great processes for changing the law to meet new conditions?
It’s the great Winston Churchill, of course. The man was a visionary and a genius. Hs words are plain but eloquent, and beautifully direct; the wisdom expressed by them is beyond argument. That some arrogant-in-ignorance little pipsqueak like the Current Occupant would dare presume to offer him any conceivable insult is incomprehensibly offensive. Churchill in his prescience had something to say to present-day advocates for the Constitution as a “living document,” too:
And here we must note a dangerous misuse of terminology. ‘Taking the rigidity out of the American Constitution’ means, and is intended to mean, new gigantic accessions of power to the dominating centre of government and giving it the means to make new fundamental laws enforceable upon all American citizens.
And so it has turned out. It didn’t happen by accident, either. He would no doubt be sick to his core at what both our nation and his own have become. And he’d be right about that, too.
Today’s installment: I’ll Be Home For Christmas, featuring the Oso Grande himself, Rodney Lanier. He’s the fellow the whole benefit project was conceived for, an excellent musician in his own right, who died shortly before its release.
And I only just realized something, to my tremendous embarrassment: I’ve been saying 12 Days Of Etc, because I had it in my head for some reason that there are fourteen tracks on this record, leaving me two extras for alternates. I was wrong; there’s only ten. But 12 Days is the traditional formulation, so I’m gonna stick with it. Sheesh, I’m a dope. Previous installments here, here, and here.
A truly fascinating look at crony capitalism—a/k/a fascism—from a guy who knows whereof he speaks.
Our corporate fascist economic system benefits big businesses who have hundreds of lawyers, lobbyists, tax specialists, and accountants to comply with the tens of thousands of government regulations, indecipherable tax code, and ridiculous laws, while small businesses are driven into the ground. Small businesses have no political influence and no ability to influence the corrupt system. The big connected conglomerates receive the government subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential treatment. Corporate fascism at its finest.
This is the definition of the Deep State. The military industrial complex, sick care complex, and Federal Reserve puppeteers on Wall Street maintain their power by financing the Deep State through their network of political lobbyists, captured journalists, manipulated think tanks, easily controlled bureaucrat lackeys, and congressional staffers who work in the shadows to create government policy favoring their special interests. Examples of this process in action can be seen in the purposely toothless Dodd Frank legislation and an Obamacare plan benefiting insurance, drug and hospital conglomerates.
The hard line libertarian view is all markets should be totally free. The government should only insure property rights are respected, while leaving people and companies to operate free of constraints, regulations and burdensome taxation. This is a childishly simplistic view of the world. Humans are extremely flawed creatures, susceptible to greed, arrogance, hubris, over-confidence, anger, vengeance, pride, envy and wrath. Whenever humans achieve positions of power they tend to become corrupted and seek to further their power and take actions to retain that power.
This is the real world. It is not going to change. The pendulum swings from the right to the left and back again, but smaller less intrusive government is not in the cards. Tax breaks are the carrots, while laws and regulations are the sticks used to keep big business and big government working in concert and reaping the rewards of a corporate fascist system. Do you ever wonder how life long congressmen, who never earned more than $170,000 per year, “retire” from government service as multi-millionaires? Do you ever wonder how one week after “retiring” from government service they land multi-million jobs with the big businesses they were supposed to regulate?
Over the course of my career I’ve been involved in and witnessed numerous instances of corporate deals with the government – some good, some bad, and some ugly. I’ll detail a few and let you decide whether they benefited society as a whole.
I strongly, strongly urge you folks to read all of this one; he cites chapter and verse from his own experience opening Ikea stores in various cities, and it’s a real eye-opener. The comments, too, are good; there’s some back and forth between Quinn and a former Ikea co-worker of his that’s both amusing and enlightening, just for starters.
Anybody who expects Trump to be able to fix all of this is dreaming. As I’ve said all along, if he can just cut back some of the regulation and punitive taxation, re-establish a southern border, and go into whatever international deals he makes with eyes wide open and keeping American interests first, that ought to be plenty enough for anybody, and will be a gigantic improvement over the last eight miserable years.
But as the man says, the Deep State isn’t going to just go away. It will require a hell of a lot more dismantling than any one man can do, no matter who or what he is. And the truth is, we all have to ask ourselves if that’s what we truly want in the first place. I suspect that most Americans would say no that proposition.
Either way: again, do NOT miss this one, people. It’s an excellent post, and deserves as wide an audience as it can get. And I only just realized I don’t have the Burning Platform in Ye Olde Blogrolle yet, which tragic oversight will be rectified immediately.
Of course, Canada boasts a rapidly expanding doofus brigade, of which the majority of our politicos, our morally defective media, and our urban Liberals are charter members. We seem in this country, and particularly in this province—call it the SRO, the Socialist Republic of Ontario—to be approaching the condition that prevails in many parts of the U.S.
But we still have a ways to go to match the dumpster of despicables that currently flourishes there, including the aforementioned Hillary, the outgoing president and his administration of “old, plump, dull frauds” (to quote Bruce Walker), a media and academic sewer overflowing with cultural Marxist subversives, a student generation who would rewrite the American Constitution if they were able to compose a grammatical sentence, entitled minorities demanding reparations and government grants, left-liberal SocProgs, and a clan of plutocrats financing every seditious organization in sight. These are people who prove the point that you can have everything and have nothing. For if you have no historical awareness, no self-scrutiny, no strength of character, and no moral substance, then indeed you have nothing—except the power to wreak harm and convulse a nation. This is as good a definition of a “despicable” as I can come up with.
I imagine a photo of American despicables posing amiably together say, Hillary, Bill, John Podesta, George Soros, Barack Obama, Michael Moore and Harry Reid, to choose at random as depraved and injurious a group of political trash as one might find in the national dumpster. The dumpster is vast enough to contain a motley crew who adhere to a septicemic ideology that would transform the nation from a bread basket into a basket case by any means available, inculcating hatred of a long and reasonably successful republican tradition, generating contempt for the productive backbone of the country, spreading pervasive disinformation, and fomenting racial discord and acts of outright violence. The dumpster of despicables should be emptied as waste disposal via legislative measures and policy initiatives by an administration representing the real people, aka the basket of deplorables. One way or another, the despicables can no longer be allowed to manipulate the levers of power if the country is ever to get back on track.
To switch from the “dumpster” analogy, these termites have been allowed to get away with devouring the foundations of Western Civ for entirely too long. Time, and past time, to fumigate the house. Otherwise, the whole thing is going to end up having to be demolished.
Time for today’s installment of the Twelve Days Of Oso Grande Christmas: Blue Christmas, with your humble host on guitar and vocals. Hope you like it. Previous installments here, and here.
How did people this hilariously inept ever gain so much power over us in the first place?
Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.
Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an auditby Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.
The Detroit precincts are among those that couldn’t be counted during a statewide presidential recount that began last week and ended Friday following a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court.
Democrat Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit and Wayne County.
Gee, imagine my surprise. The Jillary recounts meant to steal the election for Her Herness are, far from clandestinely manufacturing more votes for her as usual, now revealing widespread Democrat Socialist vote fraud instead. A local—an “anonymous insider,” according to Vox—puts us some more knowledge:
People have known for years that Democrat-controlled Detroit has been rigging elections. During the Bush/Kerry election they had GOP poll watchers arrested and ran up 100 percent voter turnouts. It was so bad the Federal judges had to allow voter ID laws they had been blocking for years to take effect in Michigan.
The Hillary/Jill recount didn’t help Hillary, but it has hurt the Democrats’ reputations and may hurt them badly going forward. The count has been stopped but the state has now ordered an audit as to how 20 Democrat-controlled locations had a lot more Hillary votes than voters.
We use drivers license scans now for a computer record poll book, so they know how many voted. The worst location had 300 Hillary votes cast by 50 voters.
It’s the tip of the iceberg, and we all know it. But by all means, libtards, let the recounts proceed. Your dumb asses might find yourselves robbed of your meaningless “Hillary won the popular vote” horseshit by the time all the smoke clears.
The notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually.
Communist states furnish only the most prominent examples of such attempted groupthink. Progressive parties everywhere have sought to monopolize educational and cultural institutions in order to force those under their thumbs to sing their tunes or to shut up. But having brought about the opposite of the prosperity, health, wisdom, or happiness that their ideology advertised, they have been unable to force folks to ignore the gap between political correctness and reality.
Especially since the Soviet Empire’s implosion, leftists have argued that Communism failed to create utopia not because of any shortage of military or economic power but rather because it could not overcome this gap. Is the lesson for today’s progressives, therefore, to push P.C. even harder, to place even harsher penalties on dissenters? Many of today’s more discerning European and American progressives, in possession of government’s and society’s commanding heights, knowing that they cannot wield Soviet-style repression and yet intent on beating down increasing popular resistance to their projects, look for another approach to crushing cultural resistance. Increasingly they cite the name of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a brilliant Communist theoretician for whom “cultural hegemony” is the very purpose of the struggle as well as its principal instrument. His writings envisage a totalitarianism that eliminates the very possibility of cultural resistance to progressivism. But owing more to Machiavelli than to Marx or Lenin, they are more than a little complex about the means and are far from identical with the raw sort of power over culture enforced by the Soviet Empire or, for that matter, that is rife among us today.
Every form of progressivism bases itself on the claim of a special, “scientific,” knowledge of what is wrong with humanity and how to fix it. The formula is straightforward: the world is not as it should be because society’s basic, “structural” feature is ordered badly. Everything else is “superstructural,” meaning that it merely reflects society’s fundamental feature. For Marx and his followers that feature is conflict over the means of production in “present-day society.” From the dawn of time, this class warfare has led to “contradictions”: between types of work, town and country, oppressors or oppressed, and so on. The proletariat’s victory in that conflict will establish a new reality by crushing all contradictions out of existence. Other branches of progressivism point to a different structural problem. For Freudians it’s sexual maladjustment, for followers of Rousseau it’s social constraint, for positivists it is the insufficient application of scientific method, for others it is oppression of one race by another. Once control of society passes exclusively into the hands of the proper set of progressives, each sect’s contradictions must disappear as the basic structural problem is straightened out.
But wherever progressives have gained power, all manner of contradictions have remained and new ones have arisen. Progressive movements have reacted to this failure by becoming their own reason for being. Theoretically, the Revolution is about the power and necessity to recreate mankind. In practice, for almost all progressive movements it is about gaining power for the revolutionaries and making war on those who stand in their way. For example, transcending private property, the division of labor, and political oppression was never Marxism-Leninism’s core motive any more than worker/peasant proletarians were ever its core protagonists. In fact, Communism is an ideology by, of, and for ideologues, that ends up empowering and celebrating those very ideologues. This is as true of progressivism’s other branches as it is of Marxism.
It’s still the same old battle against the same old foes, because their rigid ideology doesn’t permit admission of error—ever. You’ll want to read all of it; as with most all of Codevilla’s pieces, it’s deep, impeccably researched and reasoned, irrefutable, and indispensable.
The CIA is now the left’s champion of truth and beauty.
And Russia, once the friend of the useful American left, is now its enemy.
Much of this has been kick-started again by a story in The Washington Post saying that the CIA — according to anonymous sources — has concluded that Russia hacked into Democratic emails to help elect Republican Donald Trump.
The FBI, reportedly, disagrees with some findings. And the Reuters news service reports that the Office of National Intelligence, the group that oversees the U.S. spy community, will not embrace the CIA assessment for a lack of evidence.
It’s also emboldened outgoing Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the clean-faced prince of sincerity from Nevada, to all but accuse FBI Director James Comey of being a Russian agent for not publicly investigating the allegations about Russian hacking as Reid would like.
Only a short time ago, many on the left hated the CIA and thought the American intelligence service to be evil, a vast secret bureaucracy bent on destabilizing other governments and engineering foreign elections.
And many of these who now use the CIA as their champion have long insisted that Russia was not the enemy, that the Russians were misunderstood by war-mongering conservative troglodytes bent on bankrupting the country by selling weapons to the military industrial complex.
Anyone who thought Russia was the problem was to be mocked by the media and other political wits.
“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” PresidentBarack Obama famously quipped at 2012 challenger Republican Mitt Romney, who dared suggest Russia was a problem, “because … the cold war’s been over for 20 years.”
Kass, despite displaying the usual de rigeur anti-Trumpism along the way, knows what the Democrat Socialists turning on their erstwhile allies is really all about:
But Trump’s defensiveness is also understandable, since the Democrats aren’t using the Russia hack story to protect the republic. This is about Democrats — and Republicans — stripping legitimacy from the incoming president.
Bingo. They don’t really believe it themselves, of course. But it’s useful to them for the moment, and being bereft of both honor and shame—and absolutely determined to hang onto their illegitimate power and perks—they’ll happily use any tool ready to hand. There’s nothing more to any of it than just that.
The absurdity of the Russian hacking claims should be enough to put this story to bed long ago, but the media is run by the Cult so they are pumping air into this story every day. The Washington Post ran a fake news story with claims that the CIA has proof the Russians forced John Podesta to write all of those embarrassing e-mails that got released by WikiLeaks. Put another way, the people running the Post are willing to destroy what is left of their reputation to promote something they know is nonsense.
It is one thing for a campaign to cook up fake news in order to divert attention. The Clinton people were desperate to get their scandals out of the news so they made up the Russian hacking stuff. Politicians of all stripes do this sort of thing. LBJ used to accuse his opponents of horrible things, just so they would have to deny it. What the Left is engaging in now is an attempt to undermine public support of the political system. It’s as if they figure that if they can’t win, then everyone must lose.
With these vermin, it’s lose-lose for the rest of us either way: the only thing worse than their attempting to pull down the whole house of cards when they lose…is what happens when they win.
So now let’s get to the corpus of what we’re talking about. The term “Deep State” refers to the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are and wants to keep them like that—elections be damned.
Some might say that “Deep State” is just a synonym for the “Establishment,” and yet “Deep State” refers to a larger grouping, not just to the stereotypical elite “chattering class.” We can also observe that a Deep State can be found in just about every country in the world, but our focus here, of course, is on the United States.
And here in America, the Deep State has its own political consciousness, and it aims to survive any change of government with its collective will—and self-interest—fully intact.
Normally, the Deep State is hidden, albeit, at the same time, hiding in plain sight. That is, while nobody has “Deep State” on his or her business card, the reality of the Deep State is overwhelming: It’s not just the hulking office buildings of the Federal Triangle in downtown DC, it’s also the taxpayer-funded mini-metropolises that have sprouted up in Bethesda, Maryland, Crystal City, Virginia, and a dozen other hubs in and around the I-495 Beltway. (Hence the familiar phrase, “Beltway Bandits”; Virgil can attest that federal contractors have assumed a kind of ironic affection for that phrase—at least in their private conversations.)
And the proof that this New Class is doing well can be found in the Census data, which show that four of the five richest counties in the US are in the DC metro area.
And it’s this luxe life, which has reached its apex under Barack Obama, that finds itself threatened by the drain-the-swamp pledge of Trump.
They ought to feel threatened by what will happen to them if they somehow do thwart the clearly-expressed will of the people and steal the election. Advice to these shadowy malefactors: it involves torches, pitchforks, gibbets, and your personal heads on pikes. Accept the one and go find an honest way to make a living, or prepare for the other, your choice.
So there it is: the Deep State, in all its power, and its fury. It stretches across the whole of the federal government—indeed, the entirety of the country. And it includes not only bureaucrats, but also a galaxy of contractors, profiteers, and others in the nominal private sector. And it includes not only Democrats, but also Republicans. And oh yes, the MSM and the chattering class.
In other words, a great power struggle is under way: the Deep State vs. Trump.
Oh, it’s bigger than that. It’s the Deep State vs the people, against the Constitution, against liberty. It always has been, and unless and until it is dismantled, it always will.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it will not comply with a request from President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department transition team for the names of people who have worked on climate change and the professional society memberships of lab workers.
The response from the Energy Department could signal a rocky transition for the president-elect’s energy team and potential friction between the new leadership and the staffers who remain in place.
In my opinion this outrageous response is the very epitome of a government department which is out of control. Refusing to provide information to the new administration about what staff do with their work time, to me suggests the US Department of Energy believes they are a law unto themselves – they think they are above politicians and political cycles, and intend to continue wasting money on climate programmes, regardless of what the new Trump administration wants.
The key part of that last paragraph has implications so horrible for progtard junk science cultists that it’s no wonder the author skates right over them: “the staffers who remain in place.”
Say it with me: You’re fired!
Yes indeed. Five minutes after the inauguration wouldn’t be too soon.
Signs at the famed Chicago’s Second City comedy theater, which produced such greats as John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert (and some not-so-greats, like your humble reporter), is issuing rules for audience participation in its famous improvisation shows until its audience knows how to behave.
Or, at least, how to keep Second City, where supposedly no joke is off limits, a “safe space” from Trumpism.
Over the weekend, signs went up on Second City’s doors warning that the company “has a zero-tolerance policy and does not allow hate speech of any kind whether it’s directed toward our artists, employees or patrons,” and that anyone “verbalizing any homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist or prejudiced comments will be asked to leave.”
It’s not clear what Second City views as “hate speech,” (or whether the ban on such jokes extends to the troupe itself) but recent comments by its current owner, Andrew Alexander, seem to connect “hate speech” with Donald Trump. Alexander says that he “absolutely” believes that audiences have been growing “more obnoxious” over the last several years, and blames the change on “certain demographics on the Trump side.”
They either just can’t help themselves, or they really don’t see exactly what got them Trump in the first place, or they just don’t care. Whatever it is, keep it up, douchebags. You’ll do yourselves right out of the chance to exercise power over the rest of us for the next hundred years or more, and that’s just fine by me.
I keep telling you guys that nobody does this stuff like the great Mark Steyn, and he keeps right on proving it to be true.
As Richard Adler, Frank’s protégé, once told me, Lynn Loesser was a domineering woman. She was known around town, somewhat inevitably, as “the evil of the two Loessers”, a gag that’s stuck to her beyond the grave. You wonder sometimes whether her reputation hasn’t simply adjusted itself to a joke too good to pass up. Certainly, on her demonstration records with her husband, she’s very charming – and never more so than on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. Through the mid-Forties, Loesser held on to the number and he and Lynn performed it as their party piece at celebrity get-togethers in New York and Hollywood. Lynn Loesser loved the song, loved singing it, and loved the fact that it was theirs alone.
But business is business. And in 1948 Frank Loesser sold the song to MGM for Neptune’s Daughter. “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman,” huffed Mrs Loesser. “I kept saying ‘Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban?'”
Her husband figured it this way: “If I don’t let go of ‘Baby’ I’ll begin to think I can never write another song as good as I think this one is.”
It’s the highlight of the picture – Ricardo Montalban putting the moves on Esther Williams. A couple of years back, when I protested that I had nothing new to add to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, some listeners responded, “Hey, switch things around: Make Jessica the predator, and you the one trying to resist.” But that switcheroo’s as old as the song: in the movie, after Ricardo hits on Esther, it’s immediately followed by a bit of role reversal from the comedy support, with a man-eating Betty Garrett pursuing Red Skelton. It brought Loesser his fourth Oscar nomination, and this time he won – for a song that predates the movie by four years and was only included for purposes of commercial exploitation. When the film came out, Loesser found himself with a new pop hit. Two versions – one by Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, the other by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer – both got to Number Four. Frank Loesser lost a party piece and gained a standard: At the Academy Awards, it was sung by Mae West and Rock Hudson. A few years later, Ray Charles and Betty Carter nibbled the lower end of the pop chart. The only person who wasn’t happy was Lynn Loesser: “her” song was now the world’s.
Read on to find out how—amazingly—not only the SJWs but the Muslim Brotherhood (!) tie in. Steyn just might have outdone even his own formidable self with this one.
And that seems like it might be my cue to post up the second installment of our Twelve Days Of Oso Grande Christmas here. I’m not on this track myself; it features my good friends in the Aqualads doing a swingin’, surfin’ version of Sleigh Ride. Enjoy, people, and that’s an order.
Every December, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post picks the biggest political loser of the past year. In 2013, Cillizza’s selection was Barack Obama. He cited the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the NSA domestic-surveillance scandal, the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, and the continuing questions about the administration’s actions before, during, and after the attack on Americans in Benghazi.
Well, let’s see about those: Obamacare remains, and most likely will continue to, the law of the land; the NSA continues to surveil us to its heart’s content, and will go right on expanding its reach; there has been no price at all paid by those responsible for the IRS “scandal,” and they continue interfering with political dissent just as they were before; nobody has been held accountable for the Benghazi attacks, and nobody ever will be.
All those things weakened America, brought us even further under the shadow of a near-omnipotent central government, ensured the re-election of not-my-president Obama via stifling legitimate opposition, and destabilized the Middle East by empowering our Muslim enemies. The one last hope of stemming the dismal tide takes office in a month, and we’ll see what happens then. But until that momentous occasion, Cillizza’s 2013 litany looks a lot less like failure and more like one long string of victories to me. It all depends on how you define those terms, see—and on whether you grasp the Left’s intentions. Success for them IS failure for the rest of us.
The other day I chanced to hear my old National Review colleague John Derbyshire talking about Glenn’s fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who was taken ill while visiting Antarctica and evacuated to New Zealand. John’s comments on Aldrin and his comrades apply also to Glenn:
Soon they will all be gone: the last participants in the human race’s most astonishing, most audacious, most wonderfully inspirational adventure to date.
Gone with them will be the memory of a U.S.A. that could accomplish such marvels, in those last years of heroic national vigor, before we turned our energies to guilt and rancor and divisive social crusades, and to persuading ourselves and each other that in the human sphere, everything is equal to everything else.
The Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1903. Fifty-nine years later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and seven years after that Buzz Aldrin became the first man to play “Fly Me To The Moon” on the moon (thanks to the portable cassette recorder he took with him).
We are now another half-century on, a half-century devoid of giant leaps and even small steps. When my book After America came out, I was booked on “Fox & Friends” to talk it over with Brian Kilmeade. Sitting next to Brian on the couch waiting to get going, I listened to Steve Doocy link to an item on the space shuttle Enterprise beginning its journey to whichever museum it’s wound up at. Steve called it “historic”, and, as I remarked to Brian, pity the nation whose greatness becomes “historic”.
John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.
Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.
How we grew so impoverished, in spirit as well as other ways, is simple: Progressivism. It sucked the juice out of everything it touched, beginning with Progressivists themselves, as grim and desiccated a bunch of killjoys as you’ll ever see anywhere. But the good news is, they were only able to stap our vitals because we allowed them to; as Steyn himself always says, decline is a choice. And this time around America chose differently. Hopefully, we’re all done with that nonsense now, at least for a while.
