No quotes this episode as I read a really long excerpt.

I shoveled my driveway and so I can't stop eating.

It's so odd that at the precise moment when it became EASY to only have children under ideal circumstances (the introduction of the pill), everyone decided to have illegitimate children.

I read the introduction to my favorite nonfiction book "Life at the Bottom" by Dalrymple.

The conflation of victimhood with virtue was a grave mistake. –(Psychotherapist) Seerut Chawla

NY Governor Hochul says Buffalo is "a war zone."

Brittney Griner's story has, mercifully, ended. But it is a pretty funny one.

Joe Biden's White House has lobbied to have Americans deplatformed.  This is a major scandal.

“When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” ―Frank Herbert

The left does not condemn violence until it hears it pounding on its door. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Jane Goodall and the environmentalist left.

American belief in God is at (probably) an all-time low. This fills me with apprehension though I'm not religious.

A cultivated soul is one where the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary…” -Thomas Jefferson

1) FBI gets hunter laptop in 2019 2) Spends the next year warning Big Tech about disinformation specifically involving Hunter Biden 3) In August 2020, the computer store owner gives up on hopes the FBI will charge Hunter Biden with crimes and tips off Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani was under FBI surveillance at the time. 4) In September 2020 twitter’s Jim Baker, former FBI employee, was asked for a private meeting with two FBI agents with no other Twitter employees present. 5) When the Hunter laptop surfaces the next month, Baker “repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy.”

“Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once.” -William Shakespeare

"It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves." Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Where did peer review come from and haven't we had enough?

"Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment." Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don’t like to have another point of view in the room that they don’t squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling. — David Horowitz

I reflect on TwitterFiles parts 2-5

“Men ... are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, suits about contracts, convictions for perjury, flatteries of rich men and the like, which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause — the wickedness of human nature.” -Aristotle

Douglas was everything in this Munk debate. And, deservedly, won the largest victory in the history of that debate.

Besides, don't trust the media.

"The Church used to absolve sinners; today it has the gall to absolve sins." -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I criticize Tucker Carlson for no apparent reason and then discuss the recently revealed "Twitter Files."

"Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI..." -The Intercept

“Every man becomes what he teaches others to be. Those who gain victory over themselves will gain victory over others." -Dhammapada

"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." -Jesus, Luke 6:27-28

Kanye West has said some unusual things. Let's discuss them.

"I do not believe in returning good for evil. I believe in returning justice for evil. I do not believe that I can put a man under a moral obligation to do me a favor by doing him a wrong. The doctrine of non-resistance is to me absurd. The right should be defended and the wrong resisted. Goodness should have the right to protect itself." -Ingersoll

When street prostitutes moved in considerable numbers to the street corners of the neighbourhood in which I live, the senior local policeman said in response to residents’ requests that he do something about it that he would do nothing, since the women came from disadvantaged homes and were probably all addicted to drugs. He was not prepared, he said, to victimise them further. It was therefore our duty as citizens to pick the used condoms from our rose bushes. Such is life under the regime of zero intolerance.  Dalrymple, Theodore

"Prohibition doesn't work"

-It doesn't work for behaviors libertarians like but does work for behaviors they do.

-What if we banned cow's milk next year -- would not fewer gallons be drunk?

A SPECTRE IS haunting the Western world: the underclass. This underclass is not poor, at least by the standards that have prevailed throughout the great majority of human history. It exists, to a varying degree, in all Western societies. Like every other social class, it has benefited enormously from the vast general increase in wealth of the past hundred years. In certain respects, indeed, it enjoys amenities and comforts that would have made a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch gasp. Nor is it politically oppressed: it fears neither to speak its mind nor the midnight knock on the door. Yet its existence is wretched nonetheless, with a special wretchedness that is peculiarly its own.  Dalrymple, Theodore

"There is a “secret to happiness”—and it is gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person.” ― Dennis Prager

Elon Musk has been tweeting very compellingly the past two days; It is because he has become openly hostile to leftist lies from the helm of Twitter.

"...although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want..." -Edward Winslow, 11 Dec 1621.

We pardon to the extent that we love. -La Rochefoucauld

The LA Times cautions us that it might take decades to "end homelessness." Without the North Korea model, I'd say it will take us eternally longer.

The ADL wants to know, now that the left's grip on Twitter has been loosened, if it is time for Twitter "to go." But the left always wants to annihilate what it cannot have.

CBS News has investigated and finally reports that Hunter Biden's laptop is legitimate. Which is interesting because the laptop is now ancient history. What's next, will CBS News confirm the Black Dahlia wasn't a suicide?

An Antifa member stabbed two Proud Boys almost two years ago and yesterday received a sentence of 20 years. But the media aren't reporting it ofc.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them. -La Rochefoucauld

I watched President Trump's announcement. It was a little dull, quite a bit longer than it should have been (1 hr!), but it was good enough. He's the man to beat for the 2024 Republican nomination.

Note:  A prior version of this show was released on the morning of Friday 11/18.  I wasn't happy with the post-production effects meant to boost President Trump's words, so I remastered the file and am much happier with it now.

“You will feel very free once you realize there are worse things than being called a bigot. –Eva Kurilova

I discuss deer strikes.

I don't see how Republicans can often win elections without using the public purse to buy lots and lots of voters the way Democrats do.

I believe the nation was doomed the minute "general welfare" was construed to mean payments from government funds to individual Americans.

Wiser than the libertarian "The lesser of two evils is still evil" is Aristotle's "The lesser of two evils is more desirable."

This election may have done enough to impede or even cancel Biden's legislative agenda, but it was not the glorious reproach many of us wanted. But why? (spoiler I dunno)

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.” -TS Elliott

Mark Kelly and Blake Masters faced of weeks ago in what is now, according to PredictIt, the closest senate race in the country.

I tuned in to find out what happened; Here are highlights.

Joe Biden has given a disgraceful speech in which he implicates his political opponents in crimes they did not commit nor plan nor even encourage in order to gain more power.

As his own vitality and even cognizance wanes, his lust for power at the expense of truth waxes.

I give my reaction to the October 14'th debate between Walker and Warnock in Georgia.

Warnock:  Professorial, evasive, polished.

Walker:  Real, likeable, folksy.

No wonder Warnock is struggling in recent polling!

John Fetterman and Doctor Oz had their first and only debate.

Several journalists said Fetterman was pretty much fine, but it turns out they were liars. He's worse than almost anyone expected, including me. It's the worst debate performance I've ever seen; I feel sorry for the man and hope he loses and quietly recuperates, surrounded by loved ones, far away from power.

Few phrases cause me to question your manhood more than, “I identify as a man.”

Joe Biden can no longer grasp the basic facts related to his job. He believes student debt was forgiven via a law which he signed; in reality, it was an executive order. One needn't be too imaginative to see how the most powerful man in the world's departure from reality could cost us dearly.

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.” -Chesterton

History can tell you lots of things. But what it can't, or has never told me at least, is what it FELT like. I try to imagine the mood in the aftermath of the Revolution, when anything was possible, or in the runup to the Civil War, when nothing was. I strongly suspect the latter more closely resembles the present mood.

I met JD Vance and three things stuck out to me.

Like all hysterics, Rob Reiner is deluded in a second way; He does not know he is one, forgetting his own REPETITIVE history.

“Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.” -Walter Williams

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” ― Aristotle

Chris Kyle was murdered by a man who he knew was insane.

Joe Rogan wants to talk about cat-identifying students receiving litter boxes. If it's true, this is the kind of story that bores me. Why? It lets a lot of people off the hook.

“It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visited by an awareness of what holds the world together.” –Josef Pieper

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off. –Theodore Dalrymple

William Shatner got depressed in space.

Nicolas Cruz is spared the death penalty in a travesty.

An NBC reporter reports the obvious truth and is hounded by her co-professionists.

Alex Jones is ordered to pay many, many times more for spreading a rumor than OJ was for murdering people.

Stalin, through Pravda, openly advised the local organs not to give them work.

In a country where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat. –Leon Trotsky

“There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe… and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.” -Ayn Rand

It's that time of year again in which the left say I'm on indigenous land. But I don't think so.

JD Vance and Tim Ryan had a debate. There are precisely two clips that are worth noting.

"I distrust every idea that doesn't seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries." -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. -Chesterton

According to justthenews.com, the Biden administration gave millions of tax dollars to groups which funneled government accusations of "misinformation" to tech companies for censorship prior to the 2020 election. If true, the government has deprived us of our first amendment rights and subverted an election. Yikes.

Democrats are pulling out the ole last-minute irrelevant personal scandals for Herschel Walker. My question is, why do any voters care?

Joe Biden is pardoning people for marijuana possession. Why didn't Trump do this?

All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life. –Goethe

"One time we had to carry some long, heavy girders over icy tracks. If one man slipped, he endangered not only himself but all the others who carried the same girder. An old friend of mine had a congenitally dislocated hip. He was glad to be capable of working in spite of it, since the physically disabled were almost certainly sent to death when a selection took place. He limped over the track with an especially heavy girder, and seemed about to fall and drag the others with him. As yet, I was not carrying a girder so I jumped to his assistance without stopping to think. I was immediately hit on the back, rudely reprimanded and ordered to return to my place. A few minutes previously the same guard who struck me had told us deprecatingly that we “pigs” lacked the spirit of comradeship." –Victor Frankl

My Top Three Reasons to Not Vote For Tim Ryan: 1) He wants to ban the combustion engine. 2) He can't or won't define woman, doesn't know what SCOTUS' role is. 3) He wants to make DC a state, which is to say disempower Ohio -- forever.

"There is, not infrequently, a considerable social pressure not to take note of the obvious." –Hitchens

“Where there are no men, strive to be a man!” -Hillel the Elder, circa 50 BC

Joe Biden is falling apart mentally.

Jordan Peterson gave a tremendous answer to the question, "What is the greatest challenge facing humanity?" or something. "Narcissistic compassion." Wow.

The writer who loves or hates is less persuasive than the one who loves and hates. -Nicolás Dávila

"And then the evenings at home when I smoke my cigar and read my papers. Sophie knits and the children tumble about, knocking everything of! the tables. It’s all so cozy and precious…” -Archduke Ferdinand, 1904

I do some ill-fated volunteering, A woman worries if she's broken the law when she plainly hasn't, and a right-winger wins in Italy.

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation." -CS Lewis

Confused ideas and muddy ponds appear deep.  -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

People, ESPECIALLY liberals, dramatically overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed by police.  Like, by orders of magnitude.

A high school shop teacher in Canada has she/her prosthetic nips protruding.  It's the most asenine thing I've ever seen, only made more ridiculous by the fact that she/her leftwing school is backing she/her.

When I was a kid, the left said, "What happens between two consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedroom is none of my business."  Which is pretty much how I feel.  But they moved on.  Now captive minors have to witness your crazy kinks.

People online are desperate to rescue "leftism" from the tarnish other leftists are always throwing on it.  But why?  It started horrific, it's been horrific since, and it will end horrific.

Why did so many liberals tell us that the communism of the Soviet Union is not ‘real communism’ when the very suggestion that there might be a real fascism, or real Nazism, free from the moral taint of the historian variety, would be dismissed as despicable whitewash?  -Roger Scruton, 1991

"Taste is relative" is the excuse adopted by those eras that have bad taste. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The right is still writing about Norm MacDonald. JD Vance is annoying me. Why won't he ATTACK for god's sake?

The Denver Post's hand-picked "experts" have declared, at least according to the headline, that dangerous Christians are a threat to democracy.

Civilization seems to be the invention of a species now extinct. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"Diversity is our strength." -Every Democrat for the past 15 years.

High-IQ people get as low IQ as needed to maintain their cherished but dumbest belief.

DeSantis is sending a few dozen migrants to Martha's Vineyard and he's Hitler.

"The border is secure." -Kamala Harris

“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good at the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” -CS Lewis The Abolition of Man

"Many upper class white Americans are to black Americans what visibly desperate and insecure 17 year old boys are to women: separated from an idealized object of desire by an overwhelming and self-centered experience of their own need which precludes genuine human connection." -@theageofshoddy on Twitter

Women on Twitter "correct" me. But why?

Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier Hanging on by its Fingernails! The news media are hysterical, gullible drama queens.

In Canada and in Memphis, we're seeing cases where suspects OBVIOUSLY should not have been on the streets.  The only question is:  When will those of us who favor the innocent to the guilty have had enough?

"Marxism takes the darkest parts of the human soul and feeds and waters them lovingly so they grow to fill almost every part of the person, who effectively becomes a host for a deadly mind-virus." -@nua_peasant on Twitter

"Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don’t like to have another point of view in the room that they don’t squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling." — David Horowitz

President Biden gave a rare if not unprecedented speech; The way he spoke about "Maga Republicans" is far more akin to how Presidents speak about foreign war enemies than how political parties speak about one another.

“There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses— say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.” -CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men.” -Edmund Burke

A mother of two (Eliza Fletcher) in Memphis has been abducted and, almost certainly, killed by a known monster. What is wrong with our society?

"Anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world." -The Talmud

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”  -H. L. Mencken

Mental illness doesn't make you special.  -Freddie deBoer

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. –Daniel Webster

"He was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others: that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side – and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of modern popular culture." -Dalrymple, Theodore.

Are seat belts worth it? Yeah, but not by much.

“This is Africa. These are just bodies dumped into a river. Hundreds. Thousands. No one will ever count. No one will ever try to check an identity, contact a family, find out which limb was severed. Because this is Africa, and they don’t count the bodies in Africa.” -Keith Richburg

Being a kid teaches you how to not be bullied by the strong.  Being a parent teaches you how to not be bullied by the weak.

If government will pay the bill, or is expected to, students will worry less about accumulating debt than otherwise. Which incentivizes universities to care less about controlling costs. Democrats are tossing old tires onto the fire in an alleged attempt to smother it.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read." -Michael Crichton

"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things." –GK Chesterton

If people are born in the wrong body, why are there so many now? And why are there so few middle-aged women coming out and so many teens?

"A playground is a great place to be a bully, and a terrible place to be a victim, if the teachers don’t care who started it." -Eliezer Yudkowsky

“If we are going to save America, it will not be done with a badge, it will not be done with a uniform. It will be done by individuals who have simply had enough.” –Terry Jones

https://unherd.com/2022/05/you-cant-be-born-in-the-wrong-body/

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise

To know what one ought to do is certainly the hardest thing in life. ‘Doing’ is comparatively easy. – Astronomer Maria Mitchell Life, Letters, and Journals Sept 10, 1855

Liz Cheney

Norah O'Donnell

Serena Williams/Feminism

“Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.” -Francis Parker Yockey

“Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.”

― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Anne Heche had a "huge heart" yet was content to roll the dice on mowing down a family.  I have only a normal heart yet I don't plow into residences.

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed, which exposes an odd aspect of Islam:  In one respect, it's as bad for you as you say it is.

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense. –Joseph Sobran

Men have better reflexes than do women, blink a lot less often, and are much stronger.

And yet we let women become cops.

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered “five,” Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg. –Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” -Abraham Lincoln

"In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. There were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial, therefore. Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants." -Heather Mac Donald

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” -Eric Hoffer

https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine

"All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed." -Ho Chi Minh

I bought the book "Requiem," a book about wars in Indochina in the postwar period. What I got was Communist propaganda.

"This, of course, lays bare the curious moral stance of our age: it is not wrong to bash an innocent woman to death with a brick, but it is wrong to condemn the deed and its perpetrators." -Theodore Dalrymple

“There are people who are not interested in the war. Unfortunately, the war is interested in them.” -Fannie Hurst, 1941

I have saved up ~70 stories about the negligence of our justice system from this year. I'm going to tell you about six.

"Here lies Dennis Prager. He fought evil." -Dennis Prager, on his preferred epitaph.

“There are no devils left in hell.  They are all in Rwanda.”  -A Missionary, quoted in Time, May 16, 1994

Kamala Harris wants everybody to know about her suit color and

Biden's making a classic leftist prisoner exchange for Brittney Griner.

Much confusion comes from judging economic policies by the goals they proclaim rather than the incentives they create.  –Thomas Sowell

I have seen the face of a coward and found it loathsome. –Audie Murphy

"Having more than one armed person at the scene who is not a member of law enforcement can create confusion and carry dire risks." -NYT

Why yes, that's why we call them heroes.

Cowards do not say, "I am a coward." They say, "The thing which you call evil is just misunderstood. It's mental illness, it's a bad childhood, it's just another world view. So we shouldn't riskily (and unjustly!) fight so-called evil; rather it deserves our sympathy."

“Those who oppose Reagan cite, exhibiting traditional American ingenuity, almost everything they can think to say against him."  -William F Buckley

I have a final thought about Shinzo Abe:  National leaders are many things, but not cowards.  I explain.

Lebron James (moron) wonders if he were rotting in a Russian jail if he'd even want to come back to the USA.  He's incredibly dense.  And probably Smolletted himself!

A USA Today Poll in Detroit showed black residents were overwhelmingly more concerned about public safety than about "police reform."  White residents were more concerned about police reform.

“In [totalitarianism] shortages of material goods, even of necessities, were not a drawback but a great advantage for the rulers. These shortages were not accidental to the terror, but one of its most powerful instruments. Not only did shortages keep people’s minds strictly on bread and sausage, and divert their energies to procuring them so that there was no time or inclination left over for subversion…”  -Theodore Dalrymple

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.” -TS Elliott

A hero bystander at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana stops a mass shooting almost as it began. Which infuriated the left.

“Can’t wait to get up every morning at 1:30 AM every morning and rush down to the teletypes and telephones to see what wonderful things hundreds of millions of heroic people have been doing overnight.” -Paul Harvey

"In the late 1990s, girls between the ages of ten and fifteen accounted for more than 15 percent of all births in Argentina and 17 percent of all births in Uruguay. By contrast, less than 2 percent of births in the United States are to girls in that age group—and most of those are Hispanics." -Ann Coulter

Joe Biden TWICE has told the story of a ten-year-old rape victim who had to travel to neighboring Indiana to get an abortion.  To combat rape?  Nope.  To combat car rides.

"The prevalence of freakishly young birth mothers in Latin America confirms the reports.  According to CNN, 318 ten-year-old-girls gave birth in Mexico in 2011....  In the last quarter century, there’s been one reported case of an American impregnating a girl that young.” -Ann Coulter

"I have prayed just one prayer in my life: Use me."  -Ingmar Bergman film, “The Magician”

Twitter and the media were awash with predictions of Republican decimation after Dobbs in June.  Only... two new polls are out showing Republicans +8.  Ha!

"He that would fly without wings must fly in his dreams." -Coleridge

What nation in history has damned its illustrious heroes for being racially similar to a 90% majority of the contemporary population? -Victor Davis Hanson

Leftists dismiss historical figures who did unique things by pointing to things they did which were common. I discuss this phenomenon as it relates to John Paul Jones.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once.” -William Shakespeare

"The English Nation may hate me, but I will force them to esteem me too." -JPJ, 1780

John Paul Jones struggled when he wasn't captaining a vessel. Fortunately for him (and us), he usually was.

"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way." -JPJ, 1778

The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.” The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .” —Marc Stiegler, David’s Sling

SCOTUS has ruled the EPA may not force one business to subsidize another. The left melts down

"The current accepted way of regarding women is: the same as men, but different where it’s useful or flattering." –Douglas Murray

“There are some encouraging signs of polarization.” -Dr. Israel Shahak

Some thoughts on Roe and on public prayer.

“We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against the caricatures we make of them.” -J. A. Schumpeter

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." -Eric Hoffer

I do not think it’s likely that the Clintons have ever murdered or had murdered their associates. Don't be thin-skinned. You'll be miserable.

SCOTUS has ruled that New Yorkers can carry guns! Wow!

"Alto Gong, Metal Hit, B (H1).wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

I do not believe in returning good for evil. I believe in returning justice for evil. I do not believe that I can put a man under a moral obligation to do me a favor by doing him a wrong. The doctrine of non-resistance is to me absurd. The right should be defended and the wrong resisted. Goodness should have the right to protect itself… Poverty is not a virtue, nor is wealth a crime. ” -Robert Ingersoll

Maybe vegetables aren't actually good for you.

Forget Gandhi and MLK: I'd be happy if people quit committing revenge violence against the perfectly innocent.

A woman in Florida was attacked by a gator. And her imported neighbors sided with it.

“Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of goodness in the wrong way.”  -CS Lewis

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/17/alligator-lives-matter/

"Alto Gong, Metal Hit, B (H1).wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

“Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false…” -Charles Sanders Peirce

There have been a rash of anti-Asian hate crimes since Trump left. Know who woulda been blamed had he won in 2020? Me too.

Tupac would have been 51 this week. He is, and was, celebrated. But I'm going to tell you what I really think of his culture.

A man who was once on the left has left it because they allow no dissent. It's airtight.

"If food deserts truly exist—and they cannot in these times of easy transport be very extensive—the explanation lies in demand, not in supply. And demand is a cultural phenomenon." –Theodore Dalrymple

https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/why-i-stopped-being-a-leftist?s=w

"Alto Gong, Metal Hit, B (H1).wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

“Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.”  -Marcus Tullius Cicero

My power is out.  My dad doesn't take his cell phone places.

I tagged a five-year-old.  You should too.

I can’t believe how poorly President Biden has done.  I thought Trump was exaggerating.

“At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe distance, and when the engine began to move they uttered cries of astonishment and drew in their breath.  Before long they were inspecting it closely, stroking it, and riding on it, and they kept this up throughout the day.”  -Irokawa Daikichi

"Very often in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue."  -Christopher Hitchens

Ohio is considering a bill to allow teachers to carry guns with "little" training according to ABC.  24 freaking hours is little to ABC!

"I think there are these four ages about nearly everything. Let’s give them names. They are the Unenchanted Age, the Enchanted Age, the Disenchanted Age, and the Re-enchanted Age. As a little child I was Unenchanted about bicycles. Then, when I first learned to ride, I was Enchanted. By sixteen I was Disenchanted and now I am Re-enchanted."  -CS Lewis

“Among the slaves [there was] a maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it.” -Frederick Douglas

Lena Dunham has publicly displayed a great deal of her flesh. The reviews are in... lies!

Dave Weigel, a Washington Post Reporter, has been suspended for a joke. I'm torn.

It's ok to generalize about American Indians provided you're saying something (you think is) nice.

Andrew Jackson had shoot in his eye.

"The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off again on the other side. One can't help him, no matter how one tries." -Martin Luther roasting Earth, 16th c

My kids' pediatrician won't see them unless someone without Covid can bring them in.

My three year old makes increasingly insane demands at night.

Johnny Depp won his case against disgraced actress Amber Heard.

A man in the news recently was diagnosed with ALS.

Why I don't need a gun, almost ever.

Why isn't BP upfront with us?

Canadians can no longer buy, sell, or transfer handguns.

“All those who appear fools are, along with half of those who don’t.” -Baltasar Gracian, 17’th century

At the moment, criticizing “the left” has nothing inherent to do with conservatism. It’s a basic question of sanity. -Bret Weinstein

I want my kids to go to a school where all their teachers wear sidearms and outside there is a sign that says, “All our teachers wear sidearms.”

 It means something that the left in one era burns the flag over Vietnam, kneels during the Anthem because of Treyvon or whoever, raises the black power fist, won't come out during the Anthem over mass shootings.  The left always makes the national symbol the target of the protest.  Pro-lifers never did this.

"We must always ask ourselves whether as citizens we have earned what those who died at Shiloh or in the Meuse-Argonne gave us."

"It is not sustainable for the nation's privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born." Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen

“Those who cannot face danger like men are the slaves of any invader.” -Aristotle

An evil sob murdered 21 and injured 17 in Texas.

Why is this happening?

“We must go home to be happy, and our home is not in this world. Here we have nothing to do but our duty.” -John Jay

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?  -Hillel the Elder, circa 50 BC

Astronomy contains no wisdom.

A man died at the Brooklyn Half Marathon a few days ago.  Many people are happy to jump to conclusions about it instead of asking some basic questions and doing the boring thing of finding answers.

“Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes... Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage..." -Malcolm Muggeridge, 1980

It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, "but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal's deserts". The experts with perfect logic will reply, "but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?" --CS Lewis, 1954

The terrible thing about a false accusation is that, even when we believe the innocence of the accused, we’re never quite as sure of that innocence as we were prior to the accusation. It raises a faint, durable doubt.

Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct. -Leslie Fiedler, pre-1980

"To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. ... the basic principle of my Party's economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority... the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual.” -Adolf Hitler, 1931

Some remarkable facts about the Buffalo shooting and the reaction to it.

"...when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron."  -unknwon

“There's a phenomenon/fallacy I think might not have a name. The basic formula is "If only everyone would X, there'd be no Y." It has frequent appearances in progressive, conservative, and libertarian/anarcho- discourse. It's ubiquitous. Obviously, everyone won't X, so then what?”  -J Nelson Leith

It's weird the things that make us nervous. A first date. An interview. Selling a house, buying a house. None of which will kill you. Then, when it's time to drive home late at night an hour or two and you're behind on sleep, no nervousness.

“You become a libertarian when you just want to be left alone. You become something else when you realize they won't.”  –Pete Quinones

"Let's be honest - if men wanted to "control women's bodies," they'd demand an end to Ben & Jerry's and plus-sized clothing" -@Dame_ThugLife

A pro-abortion group has published the addresses of SCOTUS judges' residences. This could go very bad, very fast. And I mean VERY bad.

“That the politicians most outraged by Roe being overturned are all progressives in states with legal abortion underscores the degree to which the progressive world view is not a personal preference, but a moral absolute justifying global domination.”  -Jeremy Kauffman

The guy who attacked Chappelle is, predictably, a maniac. His landlord said of him and his miscreant rapper brother, "I’m just glad they didn’t burn my house down."

People who've never been around bad dudes don't seem to get it. So many victims.

“Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. ” -Aristotle

"Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact at all." -Michael Crichton

Today makes me feel like the only non-pro-life guy in the world who thinks Roe was trash and a national embarrassment. I'm thrilled at the news it may be overturned. Why's it so crazy to think some abortion should be legal AND to actually want to have a damn vote on it?

“Do justice, and let the skies fall.” -Ancient Roman saying

"Much confusion comes from judging economic policies by the goals they proclaim rather than the incentives they create." –Thomas Sowell

The left in San Francisco have incentivized homelessness and marvel at its increase.

The government has created a shadowy "misinformation" board in homeland security. If you question it you're a Putin stooge, needless to say.

A man in the next town over has committed his third forcible rape. He's been sentenced to another 10-15 year sentence, or, as I call it, a rape hiatus.

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.” -CS Lewis

"There are no plain and simple problems any more. From poverty to race to crime to Vietnam, all we face are crises which threaten to bring down the world upon our heads." –Ben Wattenberg, The New Republic, “The Nonsense Explosion,” 1970 Brad Paisley's "She's Everything" is pretty crappy.

Elon Musk has bought Twitter. And just like that, the left is very concerned about the squelching of political speech haha.

"Necessity is the mother of taking chances." -Mark Twain

“I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world ... And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.”  -Oscar Wilde, from prison a few years before his death

Re: The Disney Story

What's the point of the right if it has to be hostile to free speech in order to win?  What's the point of the right if it lies about decent people every day for political power?

Likewise, what's the point of the right if it continues to lose?

"The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.’ The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live." -Woodrow Wilson, 1913

“Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.” ― Joseph Alois Schumpeter

In 1989, famous Russian apparatchik Boris Yeltsin visited America. He saw our buildings, our space center, the Statue of Liberty. But what floored him -- made him despondent actually -- was a Texas grocery store he popped into. This worked.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America. —Eric Hoffer

“One of the most pervasive examples of this kind of blindness is one that I haven't seen mentioned explicitly. I'm going to call it orthodox privilege: The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions.

It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.”  –Paul Graham

I don't know why the media never publicize a "Don't resist arrest" message.

But I do know that it benefits them financially not to do so. Some black people might listen to that message. Then no shooting, no subsequent riots, no months of monster click numbers for CNN.

"Pervasive antiwhite antagonism is perhaps the best-kept secret about black inner-city culture."  –Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops

“Our philosophical motto is not 'I think, therefore I am' but 'He suffers, therefore he’s a victim.'”  -Theodore Dalrymple

"the loss of life is always tragic..."  B S

I decided to tackle the story about Charles Whitman, the famous tumor-having clocktower shooter.  Was he responsible for what he did, or was he acting against his will?

"We are choked with News and starved of History."  –Will Durant

“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”  -Thomas Sowell

We once built mental hospitals because we thought it was cruel to keep imprisoning the insane.  I don't know which was preferable, but I am certain that the worst solution is neither imprisonment nor insitutionalization of the out-of-control insane in our society since it is not only cruel to the insane themselves, but also to the sane who happen to cross their paths.  This is our current situation.

If poverty caused crime, nuns would do drive-bys.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html

"I wish to stress that, apart from strictly political questions or those fundamentally embedded in the revolution, criticism can, with limitations, be exercised for all other questions."  -Mussolini

Increasingly, there is a racial supremacy movement gaining steam in the USA.  But few people seem to notice, and no one in the media.  Let's notice.

“What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.”  -Elie Wiesel

"For the multiculturist/diversity crowd, culture, ideas, customs, arts and skills are a matter of racial membership where one has no more control over his culture than his race. That's a racist idea, but it's politically correct racism. It says that one's convictions, character and values are not determined by personal judgment and choices but genetically determined. In other words, as yesteryear's racists held: race determines identity." -Walter Williams

"They will be the first Black woman nominated to the United State Supreme Court." -Joe Biden

"All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." -George Orwell

"Blue-pilled people use language as a way to avoid thought. Their cognitive process is entirely different. They use phrases delivered to them by the corporate press to close off thoughts where a critical mind would otherwise go, akin to sewing up a hole in clothes." -Michael Malice

The story of Ignaz Semmelweis is complicated. But worthwhile. It's a story of how a man did a great thing, but not all THAT great, and then lost his mind.

As I've grown older I have lost the sense that we have "arrived" in history. We are midstream and basically indistinguishable from 100 other generations of men.