"Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it." Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Washington DC is dealing with a nasty spate of carjackings.  Or, not dealing with them, to be more accurately.  But nothing would be easier:  100 bait cars every day, ten year sentences for every thief.  Boom, civilization again.

The TV actor Matthew Perry has died.  He prayed to God, once, to be famous.

I took my boy to the hospital.  It underscored my growing contempt for the medical profession:  "For the safety of our patients no weapons are allowed."

"The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety."  -CS Lewis

It is sometimes impossible to do good without appearing racist.  Sometimes you must choose between the two.

Maybe to a more astute observer they wouldn't have.  Certainly not to a less astute one.

The first is Israel:  The response to some thousand Israelis being tortured and murdered was... widespread pro-Palestine statements and demonstrations by the intelligentsia of the West.  Is this the first time terror attacks on civilians have been openly celebrated here, aside from Ward Churchill after 9/11?

The second is that a DA in the United States is openly charging -- it is the written policy of her office -- whites more severely for the same crime.  I'm seeing absolutely red:  This woman is violating the 14'th Amendment.

But I suppose it's ironically appropriate that the 14'th Amendment, which has been taken to mean women can have abortions after heartbeats are heard and brainwaves detected, is NOT taken to mean the law must be applied equally regardless of race.

“One of the mysteries of the ages is why the political left has, for centuries, lavished so much attention on the well-being of criminals and paid so little attention to their victims.” –Thomas Sowell

"The American Revolution presents the first example of slaveholders themselves not just questioning slavery's morality but considering doing something to end the system."  -Historian Christopher L Brown

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."  -Thomas Jefferson

"We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."  -Thomas Jefferson

"The spirit of freedom which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place.  It is not the public but the private interest which influences the generality of mankind nor can the Americans any longer boast of an exception."  -George Washington

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend” it.

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."  -Abraham Lincoln

Book:  A Disease in the Public Mind, Fleming (2014)

"Lots of discussion at the sexual revolution debate about whether the revolution failed men, or failed women, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know. Too depressing a topic."  @robkhenderson September 15, 2023

Happy Columbus Day!

Hamas has killed 900 Israelis.  Why?  Because for decades Israel has gone unbearably soft on this menace.  It should finally say "no more, no matter what."  It should finally win.

"Though we bristle when we read of European colonists calling native people savages, and justly fault them for their hypocrisy and racism, it’s not as if they were making the atrocities up. Many eyewitnesses have brought back tales of horrific violence in tribal warfare. Helena Valero, a woman who had been abducted by the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan rain forest in the 1930s, recounted one of their raids:

Meanwhile from all sides the women continued to arrive with their children, whom the other Karawetari had captured. … Then the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but they caught them, and threw them on the ground, and stuck them with bows, which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and rocks. … All the women wept."  -Steven Pinker

Radio is the theater of the mind.  Television is the theater of the mindless.  –Steve Allen

"In the past 24 hours:

A liberal gay reporter was shot & killed in his home in Philly

A far-left activist was stabbed to death by a deranged stranger in Brooklyn

Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked at gunpoint in DC by 4 black men

But the crime wave is not real"  -@EndWokeness

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.  -Eric Hoffer