We all have enough strength to bear the troubles of other people.  -La Rochefocauld

Call someone an isolationist or an anti-war activist, call it a sin tax or a progressive tax, call it an incentive or an effort to "fight" the thing incentivized.  Either way, the wise man knows words don't change how a thing works by even one little bit.

"Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future ills; but present ills triumph over it."  -La Rochefocauld

"Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire.  A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience, that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it."  –Hitchens

Many of the reactions upon OJ's passing were deeply disturbing.  I share them with you so you know what to expect.

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

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

A man gave his coat to a homeless bum and the homeless bum up and stole his wallet as thanks.

Solar eclipses are so overrated as to be barely worth looking up for.  Rarity aside, solar eclipses are about as interesting as rain.

"Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”  -CS Lewis

https://twitter.com/AmiriKing/status/1776344677991453080

Happy Easter!

I discuss the enslavement of perhaps 1,000,000 white/Christians by the barbary pirates and the man who finally brought that trade to an end.

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."  -GK Chesterton

Seems like just yesterday Conan O'Brien et al were telling us about what a lovely place Haiti was, on account of Trump said it wasn't.  As the corpses are roasting in the streets, join me on a stroll down memory lane.

"I am terrified of Africa.  I don't want to be from this place."  -Keith Richburg

"I'm leaving Africa now, so I don't care anymore about the turmoil in Rwanda and have no interest in this latest tragic development."  -Keith Richburg

“It has been said critically that there is a  tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war.”  January-February 1929, The Military Engineer, “Some Notes on the World War” by J. L. Schley (Lieutenant Colonel, Corps of Engineers), pg. 55, col. 1L

I read the State of the Union address and will give my thoughts.

““Did you ever in all your life see the head of a human being which so closely resembled that of a cod fish?”

“He is not responsible for his head or his face. But why do you say he is a fraud? The newspapers call him a reformer, and give him credit for great efficiency.”

“I deny your conclusions,” he replied. “A man of fifty is responsible for his face! Yes, I know he is courting the newspapers: that proves him a humbug and presumptively a fraud.”

A few months later the official in question was found guilty by a court-martial of peculation and fraud in the management of his bureau and dishonorably expelled from the service.”  -Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, quoted by Lucius Crittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration

“Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good?"  -Stephen Pinker

According to my rough calculation, 50 million people were killed by their non-government countrymen in the 20'th century.  According to RJ Rummel, about 250 unarmed people were intentionally killed by governments over the same span.  5:1

"The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another one dead."  -Stephen Pinker

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

-Robert Frost. "The Secret Sits" (1942)

@psychiconfire makes a good point on Twitter.

Sometimes it is impossible to do good without appearing mean.

What does doing evil feel like?  Sometimes, *exactly like* doing good.

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation says we will pass 300% debt:GDP ratio in 2044, 500% in 2058, and 1000% in 2078.  It's probably later than you think.  This present system of vote-buying will end, one way or another.

Certain jobs can only be done properly by people who don’t care too much if they are fired.

Out of the crooked timber of man, no straight thing was ever made.  -Immanuel Kant

A Welsh slave was once given a direct order by his captor and notorious butcher of men, sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco.  He refused it and lived.

This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.  –Stephen Kotkin

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings - no matter what color or creed any of them are.  –Thomas Sowell

"How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint."  –Robert Frost

"One woman died and more than 20 others were injured when gunfire erupted at the Kansas City parade."  -BBC

What I hate about Bill Maher - no retractions.

“Where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident.”  -Dr Johnson

Nikki Haley:  "I am going to beat President Trump." 

"In the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective." -CS Lewis

"It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear."  –Ayn Rand

Jim Jordan has revealed leaked Amazon emails.  One of which says:

"Starting March 9—the same day as its meeting with the White House—Amazon enabled “Do Not Promote” for books that expressed the view that vaccines were not effective."

I have two things to say.

The first is:  With government as limitlessly large and therefore limitlessly powerful as it is at present, it can do immense harm to your company or your life out of pure spite.  You will pay far more for thumbing your nose at the state than you would have in, say, 1880.

The second thing I have to say is:  These are among the biggest scandals in our history.  They will not be treated as such by our media because our media agree with infringing our First Amendment.

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”  -James Madison

"A lie never lives to be old."  –Sophocles

Walmart Battle Orc @ASo1omons:  "Brits are lost."

Egyptians only kept records of the good things.  So every battle was a win, just... closer.

Three illegals have been charged with armed robbery in Massachusetts.  I think the punishment should be somewhat more severe than whatever free room and board they will undoubtedly receive.

One reason why political pugilism is so popular is everybody wins.  At least, everybody who likes you and who you therefore like in return will slap you on the back no matter how poorly you did.

I may have figured out why the left, for all it's incessant winning, is so miserable.

“Astronomy’s much more fun when you’re not an astronomer.”  -Brian May

“You ask me what makes Rockefeller the unquestioned leader in our group.  Well, it is simple. In business we all try to look ahead as far as possible. Some of us think we are pretty able. But Rockefeller always sees a little further ahead than any of us—and then he sees around the corner.”  -John Archbold

I've been listening to a "Great Course" on Audible.  It's by a man of the left and is therefore alienating and a bit dull.

He manages to critique Isaac Newton, the Bible, and Great Britain in the first two hours.

“Often it is those who are most critical of a ‘Eurocentric’ view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race.” -Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals

*disturbing content*

Martin Luther King, Jr was many things.  Like me, he advocated nonviolent protest.  Unlike me, he was a Communist sympathizer.  An advocate of reparations and antiwhite discrimination.  But the most distressing allegation about the man is what he did in a hotel room once in the early 1960s.

https://www.davidgarrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DJGStandpoint2019.pdf

“Man, I went through hell … I’ve really never been this sick,” he said.

Stern also thanked those who helped develop the vaccine against COVID-19.

“What a wallop this thing is — can you imagine if we didn’t have the vaccine?”

Josh Slocum:  Mistakenly once believed "That "science" was an un-contaminated-by-human-ego endeavor that could solve all human problems."

To tolerate does not mean to forget that what we tolerate does not deserve anything more.  -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet in law ought any man use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death, if a man is willing to say or do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death.  –Socrates

"I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?"  -Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"If the world is against the truth, then I will be against the world." —St. Athanasius of Alexandria

“In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.”  -Joseph Sobran

A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965, CBS, commissioned and sponsored by Coca Cola was simply breathtaking.  I play a clip

“The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, and the second best time to plant a tree is now.”  -Local city councilman George W. White in 1967

“It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

…

All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.

…

People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”  -CS Lewis

I notice that on political debate shows, and in history textbooks, the bias is not found so often in lies or in errors, but in omissions, in focus.

John Ratcliffe was a fine man who was later made into a villain by leftists.  Why?  Because leftists rape history.

A man on Twitter asked me if "invaders" were "the bad guys."

1) Only sometimes.

2) Invasion pre-supposes boundaries and laws.

3) Is the leftist standard that illegals are "the bad guys" no matter what is done to them?

No, the truth is they just hate Europeans and will use any twisted logic to make Europeans history's perpetual bad guys.

The Celebration Parallax may be stated as: “the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it.”  -Michael Anton

“That’s not happening and it’s good that it is.”  -Michael Anton

“The War on Noticing.”  -Steve Sailer

“A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”  -Anthony Daniels

"...contemporary leftism is a revenge plot with themselves as its targets..."  -Michael Anton

"Now, God be praised, I die in peace!"  -James Wolfe

"I am happy that I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec."  -Louis-Joseph de Montcalm

"Of the mother I was ten times more afraid than I ever was of my own parents."  -George Washington's schoolmate on George's mother

George Washington had four bullets through his coat and two horses shot out from under him.  And that was before he ever got to the Revolution.

George Washington was not offered permanent service in the British military because the latter hired and promoted on the basis of nepotism.

George Washington really wanted to win the Revolutionary War.  He was desperate for it, thank God.

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”  -Friedrich Nietzsche

I stumbled upon a #MeToo video from 2018 and it's as foreign to me now as a video of the Salem Witch Trials would be.  What were people thinking?  Louis CK asked women if he could masturbate in front of them.  Love it or hate it it's not the work of Genghis Khan.  But that's how it was treated.  Louis inspired the same hatred as a Saddam Hussein did.

"... a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors. I’m telling you, this is the way modern society works—by the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear. . . ."  -Michael Chricton

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.  -Abraham Lincoln

We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors.  Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom; our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.  And 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, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty. We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us: we often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them; the occasions and relations whereof you shall understand by our general and more full declaration of such things as are worth the noting, yea, it hath pleased God so to possess the Indians with a fear of us, and love unto us, that not only the greatest king amongst them called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us, so that seven of them at once have sent their messengers to us to that end, yea, an Fle at sea, which we never saw hath also together with the former yielded willingly to be under the protection, and subjects to our sovereign Lord King James, so that there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly, neither would have been but for us; and we for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood, as in the highways in England.  -Edward Wilslow, 11 Dec 1621 

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.  -Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

Three years ago a French teacher named Samuel Paty was killed on his way home from the high school at which he taught because a Muslim was offended by Paty's speech.

What has the effect been?  Well, two years after a British teacher made the same gesture Paty had (showing a drawing of Mohammed), he is in hiding under an assumed identity.  His life and the lives of his family have been turned upside down.

And now 55% of teachers in the UK would not use images of "prophet" Mohammed in their classrooms even if it were relevant.

The effect of terror is orders of magnitude larger than those killed or maimed.

Those who imported millions of Muslims or supported doing so have the blood of your countrymen on your hands.  In a moral sense, you do not deserve to be here any more than they do.

I watched an interview with a Soviet defector.

He said journalists:

-1) Fear the enemy so lie for him.  a la Vichy France.  2) If journalists tell the truth about figures they cover, typically they will be fired.  So all the remainers are loyal and therefore are disqualified from real journalism.  This is not true when a journalist's employer hates the target, of course.

“I thought that it was proper to commit injustice, so long as I would be the only one to suffer. But nothing can justify injustice.”  -Ayn Rand

Professor Gad Saad has painted a picture of the average anti-semite in America:  He's a white hick from the South!  Yes, this is what he and people like him really believe.  It's one of the last forms of acceptable, high-society bigotry left.  Of course, polling shows that white protestant middle-of-nowhere types actually hold Jews in high esteem, which, as you might realize reading the Saad Tweet, is not reciprocated.

The World Jewish Congress has published an ad against tearing down pictures of abducted Israeli children.  Who's tearing them down in the ad?  That's right, beautiful blonde coeds.  Just like has never happened once.

I don't find this sort of thing funny anymore.  I don't laugh at it, even in mockery.  This is evil.  

On a related note, it turns out that the trans Nashville Christian school shooter hated white privileged kids for going to fancy private schools.  The so-called tranifesto has leaked to that effect.

Me and my kids are the last group you're allowed to hate.  "Abolish Whiteness."  I'm not playing along for one more second.

"We are often told it’s foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. I say it’s just as foolish to feed the hand that bites you."  Marji Ross

"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

"[Some] used their belief that blacks were innately lacking in ability to justify, for example, forbidding the teaching of blacks. Frederick Law Olmsted’s response to the claim that blacks were no more capable of being educated than animals were was to ask why there were no laws forbidding animals from being educated."   -Thomas Sowell

I had a leftwing friend years ago and I explained why I was so outraged by NPR.  “Taking my tax money to push an ideological agenda I hate!”

My friend couldn’t wrap his head around what I was so mad about.

The failure to put themselves in our shoes is almost total.

Therefore I propose hundreds of radio stations and podcasts funded by the left via tax money which push rightwing politics.  We have to explain less and illustrate more.

“I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute; but I know how to raise a small and obscure city to glory and greatness...whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim.”  -Themistocles

When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble. –Camile Paglia

Russell Brand is in hot water because the media and ex-girlfriends hate his politics.

Which makes me wonder: How many Ukraine-flag waving triple maskers have skeletons in their closets? Bet more than a few. But the correct politics can cover you for quite a long time.

just got raped. i’ll let you know who the culprit is in about 10 years or so when i’m bored -@ChillAssMinor

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

"Perhaps all history books hold a danger for those who don't know a great deal of history already" -Herber Butterworth

Given that there are virtually no writings by American Indians during the early years of contact, what do you assume they were like?  Do we take Europeans' descriptions of them at face value, or do we imagine what they were like based on movies and biased histories?

"You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you."  -Karl Popper

“That idea of hardships being good for character and of talent always being able to break through is an old fallacy. Talent alone is helpless today. Any success requires both talent and luck. And the “luck” has to be helped along and provided by someone. … Talent does not survive all obstacles. In fact, in the face of hardships, talent is the first one to perish; the rarest plants are usually the most fragile… Are talented people born with tough skins?  Hardly.  In fact, the ore talent one possesses the more sensitive one is, as a rule.”  -Ayn Rand, 1936

We like to tell stories of how adversity makes us better.  "That which does not kill me..."

But adversity makes us weaker.

America was less free after WW1 (Permanent income tax).  America was less free after WW2 (Taxation went from approx 5% of GDP before WW2 and approx 20% after.  It's practically never been below 15% since.  JFK's assassination all but doomed us financially (LBJ, Dems unequivocally big govt).

Bad things proceed from bad things, good from good.

Good families make good men and women.  Bad families make bad men and bad women.  If adversity were good it would be reversed.

Wars in Iraq, afghanistan:  6.5 T, 8 T

More than 7,000 troops and 8,000 contractors died in Afghanistan/Iraq. 

Wound rates for troops are perhaps 10x as high, 70,000 troops.  I never forget the wounded because some of them were grievously so, only marginally less so than the dead.

Bear in mind the USA, in current dollars, spent approx 4-5 trillion on WW2.

So we are accomplishing less and less with more and more.

We thought too much about how we would be judged by historians or journalists and too little about getting the desired effect.

In closing, adversity can piss up a rope.

"Well I believe that whatever doesn't kill you makes you very, very weak."  -Norm MacDonald

Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." -MLK Jr, 1967

Mayor Eric Adams has said that illegal immigration will "destroy" New York. My question is why are the feds sending them?

An influential Minnesota Democrat is now a law-and-order enthusiast after thugs broke her leg. But why is there such a failure of empathy on the left for victims of crime before they themselves are battered?

"It is easier to forgive the evil done to others than to forgive the evil done to oneself, especially if in the first place we don't really like those others to whom the evil is done." -Theodore Dalrymple

"Recently I was sent for review a book by a woman who had been in analysis for twenty years, with four or five sessions a week, in all about four thousand.  Four thousand hours of talking about oneself!  Full marks for endurance, if not for choice of subject matter."  -Theodore Dalrymple

"The suicide rate among the medical fraternity is said to be between 5-7 times the general population with psychiatrists on the unfavourable end of the spectrum across specialities."  -Guarding the Gatekeepers, Psychiatry Res, 2020 Dec

"Often the masses are plundered and do not know it."  –Frederick Bastiat

I took the day off due to the holiday but you'll still get two shows this week.  Just not today.

"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 jailing of political opponents is a feature of repressive dictatorships, not vibrant democracies."  -The Atlantic, October 2016

The law means nothing today. And I hate to say this, and I've always loved my country and I've always believed that America was something that, today, I would tell you that I'm not so sure that the America that I've loved all my life ever existed.

When I see what has happened to America, I don't recognize my nation. I don't recognize my country. And when I look at young people, as well as my own great grandchildren, I'm not optimistic at all about their future.  -Carol Swain, retired professor of law at Vanderbilt

“I haven’t missed [striking Detroit newspapers] myself.  It’s better to be uninformed than misinformed. I even doubt some of the pictures I see in the papers.”  -Orville Hubbard, mayor of Dearborn, 1955

We tend to believe others are like us.

The average leftist who tells us private charity could never pay for the hopeless charity cases… doesn't herself give very much.

Women who are into politics universally share the opinion that nothing is of greater interest to their sex.  Certainly not gossip or makeup, though chrome histories beg to differ.

“You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight.”

― Charles Mackay

Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future ills; but present ills triumph over it. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Lucy Letby is a British nurse who murdered seven babies. She has been given a "whole life" order, which is British for "very serious indeed." But it's not serious enough I'm afraid.

I read this touching passage in a study about the family members of the murdered: "One participant is Catholic, a religion that is traditionally opposed to the death penalty. She noted that if it had resulted in this scenario, she would have given up her religion in order for her to support capital punishment for her son’s murderer."

Just kidding he seems like a good guy.

But I did listen to him and Tucker talk for 45 minutes so here are my thoughts from that interview alone.

   Their voices  were  even  and  low,

  Their  eyes  were  level  and  straight.

   There was neither sign nor show,

  When  the  English  began  to  hate.

-Rudyard Kipling

I'm not going to legally analyze the charges against Donald Trump.  Many people have done that better than I can.  I can only tell you what I perceive is the gravity of the present situation from my knowledge of history:  We are in dire straits.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.  -Winston Churchill

We are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Paul Graham: If you'd told me as a kid that in the 2020s liberals would be the ones punishing dissent and the protest songs would be conservative, I not only wouldn't have believed it, I couldn't even have imagined it.

Humanity does not suppress an error without simultaneously erasing several truths. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism." -Ronald Reagan, 1975

Lebron's school is failing although it's very well-funded and does everything Democrats would like. It's a family! Maybe that's the problem.

A law professor sniffs at objections from Trump as to the fairness of the DC venue. This reveals the ugly power-hungry beast that is leftism. It sees no injustice if done to its competitors for power.

"We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I. is tending in that direction." -Harry Truman

“You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”  -Unknown

Civilization requires universal standards. 

Either all our cultures will develop a sense of accountability or all will develop a sense of unaccountability:  A house divided cannot stand.

“sufficient female institutional power is incompatible with what we call civilization.”  -@explicatur1

“Given how passive celibacy has become the overwhelming temptation of our time, maybe aspiring servants of God should take a vow of nymphomania”  -@filthyarmenian

The left uses science the way the Germans used to:  It means what they want it to mean.  Their studies all point in one direction, that humans are in mortal danger and the only solution is leftism in power with fewer checks and balances than before.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”  -Ben Franklin

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

Matt Yglesias:  Any means of forcing Japanese surrender would have killed incredible numbers of civilians, the guilty parties are the imperial officials who insisted on continuing a hopeless war.

Me:  And most importantly way more of our guys.

Marxist He/Hims: 

Nationalism is gross.

Beyond America's borders do not live a lesser people.

Actually soldiers of any sort dying is better than civilians of any sort dying.

“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.”  -CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”  -CS Lewis, Prince Caspian

People have a tendency to wallpaper over times and places with which they are unfamiliar with a  kind of light blue color.  "Oh that tribe I know nothing about?  Sure maybe some of them were mean but by and large I bet they were nice."

In some cases the wallpaper is covering a horrible infestation.

Consider the not-atypical Roman conquering of Carthage.  How was it different from the conquests of Hitler?  The past WAS Hitler.

The quarrel is begun... In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.  –Edmund Burke, 1770 describing a conflict between the King and the House of Commons

"Whoever said ‘the customer is always right’ was a customer."  –Jimmy Hatlo in Daytona Beach Morning Journal April 2, 1943

I was reading a mainstream history website about technological contributions of various ancient regions.  When I got to sub-saharan Africa, there was one entry:  The Dogon people of Mali.  They knew thousands of years before everyone else about Jupiter's moons and the Sirius star system, things practically invisible to the naked eye.  Or so the website said.  It turns out, to a few brave souls, the likelihood that one anthropologist lied seemed a little stronger than the mystical discovery by otherwise backward people isolated in the interior of Africa.  One even went back to check.

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.”  ― Lee Kuan Yew

We write things down, both to help us remember, and to help us forget. –Naval

There's a genre of leftwing error that relies on knowing exactly one thing about a topic.  If you know two or zero you can't have the leftwing view.

Heard from a leftist lady today that Americans are fat because they're poor: Let's demolish this like a fat guy with a McDouble.

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

One of the links between Freud and Marx is their purportedly rational, scientific-sounding explanations for things. You get the same stuff from Magnus Hirschfeld, of Weimar Sex Clinic fame. A lot of what is going on is the academic laundering of a particular worldview.  -@threejacques

A Twitter spat goaded me into watching one of Rogan's monumental interviews with current Democrat vice-frontrunner RFK Jr.  The question at hand is, "Is he a kook?"  Which I understand is a North American slang word.  To my British former overlords, the question is, "Is he batty?  A nutter?  Mental?"  Anyway, spoiler alert:  Yeah he is a bit.

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.” -Shakespeare, Macbeth 

h/t Zaid Jilani:  Wired doesn't recommend Ring doorbells because they can be used by the homeowner to easily provide evidence to police. Good lord. 

Ben and Jerry's released a statement about how stolen land must be returned to the natives! And then a tribe which once resided where Ben and Jerry's HQ lies accepted hah.

"CHARACTER Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself." -Shakespeare, Macbeth

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s

In deepest consequence.”  -William Shakespeare

"Land acknowledgments are low key the most based thing imaginable. Reciting the names of all the people you conquered at the start of every meeting."  -@typesfast

"I wonder if victims of affirmative action will ask for reparations now that it has been ruled unconstitutional."  -@ScottAdamsSays

Criticisms of the early USA almost always describe most or even all of the world in 1776.  "They didn't let women or blacks vote."

But not one country in the world elected its leaders at that time.  Is not some of a good thing to be commended?

“your cause of sorrow. Must not be measured by his worth, for then. It hath no end.”  -William Shakespeare

"You will have heard before this reaches you of the Commencement of a Civil War; the End of it perhaps neither myself, nor you, who are much younger, may live to see."  -Ben Franklin, 1775

"Almost half the signers of the Declaration of Independence had some form of seminary training or degree."  -A Patriot's History of the United States

"France... came away from the conflict with... a terrific debt, which played no small part in its own revolution in 1789."  -A Patriot's History of the United States

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country..."  -Thomas Paine, 1776

“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

I discuss the landmark SCOTUS decision eliminating racial preferences in higher education, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's historic blunder, and smear enjoyers of Catcher in the Rye.

Horace - "Should the whole frame of Nature round him break, / In ruin and confusion hurled, / He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, / And stand secure amidst a falling world."

Where religion is compulsory, I am an atheist; but where religion is forbidden, I am a believer.  –Theodore Dalrymple

Saira Rao is an antiwhite bigot.  So what?  Well, Andrew Yang endorsed her.  Antiwhite hatred is a zero to the left.

Just as a man can commit suicide due to guilt, so can a nation.

“Modernity is so overwhelming, from school, advertising, print, video, movies, politics, etc., all things push human life and thinking one way. One way to find another opinion, perhaps the only way, is to reach into the past.”  -Clay Garner

The fire and brimstone leader of the first Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, warned children in 1741:  "And you, children, who are unconverted, do not you know that you are going down to hell, to bear the dreadful wrath of that God, who is now angry with you every day and every night?"

The deceased CEO of OceanGate previously sniffed at the idea of hiring "a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys" in favor of demographics he found more "inspirational."  I do not know if a strict merit focus when hiring would have saved his doomed passengers and himself, but if it would have I'm sure they are not the first human sacrifices on the altar of diversity.

"Their foot shall slide in due time."  —Deut. 32:35.

"Virginia had actually voted to ban slavery early in the century, but the government of “Good Queen Anne” overruled the act because of the royal treasury’s dependence on revenues from British slave traders.  At the time, only 25,000 slaves had arrived in Virginia, and an outright ban might have permitted most, if not all, to sail home to Africa, thus aborting the growth of slavery in America.  In the next half century, however, Virginia’s many appeals to end slave importations brought nothing but rejections from the three Georges who mounted the British throne in succession.  By 1770, more Africans had crossed the Atlantic – albeit involuntarily – than Europeans, and Virginia’s slave population grew almost eightfold, to nearly 190,000, the equivalent of 20 percent of the white population.  The slavery issue had grown insoluble.”  -Harlow Unger, Lion of Liberty (Patrick Henry biography)

I've decided to not celebrate Juneteenth:  I'm celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day instead.

“only the wise man knows who are worthy to be loved.”  - Antisthenes, disciple of Socrates

Perhaps the strongest case against the predominance of discrimination as an explanation of economic disparities would be a comparison of blacks in Haiti with blacks in the United States.  Since Haiti became independent two centuries ago, Haitian blacks should be the most prosperous blacks in the hemisphere and American blacks the poorest, if discrimination is the overwhelming factor, but in fact the direct opposite is the case.  It is Haitians who are the poorest and American blacks who are the most prosperous in the hemisphere-- and in the world.  –Thomas Sowell

Sometimes the AP is very descriptive about suspect descriptions and sometimes it is as tight-lipped as a mafia witness.  You know when, don't you?

The ---- is the cancer of human history.  -Susan Sontag

"I really don't think these guys know what they're talking about.”  -Richard Feynman on the “Nuclear Winter”

"Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world from nuclear disaster, on this day in 1983, 39 years ago today, saw the word "LAUNCH" flash across the Soviet Union's attack early warning system. His screen stated with high reliability that a total of five American intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) had been launched and were headed toward the Soviet Union. Petrov had to make a decision: should he report an incoming American strike, or should he hold off, confident that what they were seeing was a false alarm?

If he reported it, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation. There would be no time to double-check the warning system or seek negotiations with the U.S. This occurred during the Reagan administration, which had taken a firmer stance against the Soviets compared to previous administrations. The Reagan administration was deploying Pershing I nuclear-armed missiles to West Germany and Great Britain, capable of striking the Soviet Union. Given these circumstances, Petrov had reasons to believe that Reagan's brinkmanship had escalated to an actual nuclear exchange."  -@historyinmemes

It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes:  love, charm, kindness, charity.  But there is no substitute for competence.”  -Ayn Rand

“Fame is fleeting; popularity an accident; riches take wings.  Only one thing endures:  character.”  -Horace Greeley

A Syrian refugee in France has stabbed several babies.  I read men nearby ran away.  I think I know why.

“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”  -Friedrich Nietzsche

“You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”  -Milton Berle

"Many cities have used federal COVID-relief money to hire more police officers, and there is some evidence—albeit preliminary—that adding police officers helps to reduce homicide..."  -The Atlantic

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."  -George Orwell

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”  -Eric Hoffer

“The drive to reopen schools is rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny”  -Chicago teacher's union

"If you were sitting here in Manhattan back in 2007, or in San Francisco, and you told me the average rent would double in the next sixteen years, I would say that’s completely impossible. People would just move..."  -Peter Thiel

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”  -Jerry Pournelle

All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy.  -Dennis Prager

You know who should feel gratitude for the US?  Everyone.  But who in particular?  South Koreans.  I'll explain.

“The wise and the good never form the majority of any large society and it seldom happens that their measures are uniformly adopted.... [All that wise and good men can do is] to persevere in doing their duty to their country and leave the consequences to him who made men only; neither elated by success, however great, nor discouraged by disappointments however frequent or mortifying.”

― John Jay

National Review:  "Sackett v. EPA: SCOTUS Clarifies Roles of Congress, EPA"

Washington Post:  "Supreme Court EPA ruling limits enforcement of the Clean Water Act"

Rolling Stone:  "Supreme Court Slashes EPA’s Ability to Regulate Water Pollution"

“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

"No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon."  -Mark Twain

What you get in an American Catholic Mass in 2023 is about as authentic as the Chinese food at a strip mall in Idaho.

Sey Hersh wrote a long piece in the Columbia Journalism Review early this year and it's worth skimming.  Basically, journalists have made their profession despised by deceiving the American people in their fervor to get Trump.  They took particular advantage of people who have the psychological precursors of Democrat positions. 

As of 2022 the vast majority of Democrats believe 2016 was stolen by Russians.  Thanks New York Times!

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”  -Thomas Jefferson

I watched CNN's town hall from awhile back and was impressed with the President.  But the "journalist"?  Hah.

Ronald Reagan is "trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from 'Mein Kampf.'" -- Rep. William Clay Sr., D-Mo., 1983.

The New York Post has said some remarkable things in a recent column.  Of the "Russian information campaign" letter to let Hunter/Joe off the hook prior to 2020:  "The letter was a disinformation operation by the CIA to help Joe Biden win the 2020 election."  Of those who signed on:  "Every one of those 51 intelligence officials knew the laptop was real and was not Russian disinformation."

George W. Bush "let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black." -- Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., 2006.

It was, I often mused, one of Somalia’s strangest paradoxes.  When no one comes to help, they cry that the world is indifferent to their suffering.  And when people do come, what do the Somalis do?  -Keith Richburg

I pointedy disagreed with someone about the causes of disparate crime rates in the USA.  And so Twitter has suspended me.  Did I "directly attack" people on the basis of race?  Ethnicity?  National origin?  Serious disease?

What I hear is mostly backward-looking, not inward-looking. It seems to me that if the race is ever going to progress, we might start by admitting that the enemy is within."  -Keith Richburg Out of America

and that was a mistake.

If you're wondering who James Lindsay is he's sort of a hit on rightwing Twitter but isn't a household name in the general public.

He grates on me as he's both smug and boring.

I watched a two hour, 11 minute talk and got about 10 minutes from it.  That's because there was very little that was shareable.  I mean this thing was dull.  I don't want to say this thing was boring but if Lorena's knife had been this dull John wouldn't have even woken up.  This thing was dull I tell ya.

"The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones."  -Royal Dutch/Shell employee Don Huberts, 1999

I was arguing with a man today who told me that maybe we'd run out of oil if we don't defy the environmentalists and build nuclear.  To be honest, I'm skeptical.  I don't think you CAN run out.  I don't think that's how raw materials work.

He said, "But it doesn't hurt to have a plan B"

1. Could it take a million years?
2. How many tons of, say, oil and gas are created within the Earth each year?

But let's think about his "doesn't hurt to have a plan B"

What if some Earl back in 1100 had said, "What if the sun burns out?  What if next year all the fish go extinct?"  Whatever.  "Never hurts to have a plan B."  He should have been thinking about the black death or syphilis or crop rotation or the likeliest of the next hundred intra-European wars. 

There are problems to be solved in their own time.

"Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own."  -Matthew 6:34 

"Starting today, home borrowers with good credit above 720 will get socked with thousands more in borrowing costs thanks to Biden's new race-based lending penalty to compensate for higher risk of cutting fees for poor-credit borrowers, all to boost minority homeownership"  -Paul Sperry

@still_oppressed says it is a dog whistle to post a picture of Blake Mohs, who was a Home Depot employee, alongside his murderers who shot him while trying to steal.

@FrankDeScushin has calculated the telling difference in donations between two recent shooting victims' GoFundMe campaigns.  0.36%

"Is it less racist to care about the victims or the criminals?”  –John Lott

“We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us… but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?”  -JG Farrell

I would like my kid to go to a school where they paddle but I don't think that's a thing.

It’s unnerving how many things lasted from Christ (or longer) until twelve minutes ago.

The death penalty.

Spare the rod spoil the child.

Marriage being lifelong.

Marriage being exclusively hetero.

Swift criminal punishments.

Etc

"No doubt Christianity has much to answer for in its long history, but the sight of an age-long tradition treated in this way filled me with disgust. It is one thing for traditions to die out of themselves; it is quite another for them to be killed by men who think they know everything, by men whose vengeance extends even to the past, even to the dead."  –Theodore Dalrymple

People think the opposite of being a feminist is being a misogynist but it isn't.  The opposite is being happy.

Leftists are congenitally miserable.  It's the price they pay for winning all the time.

Tucker Carlson has parted ways with Fox.  I offer some thoughts.

And he’s not even that great. He just never stops trying to be.”  @theantiherokate

“When Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths, he replied, ‘This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.’” -Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism

In 1989 a mask-off moment occurred. It was erroneously reported that fusion had been cracked: Limitless, almost free energy was humanity's immediate future. But environmentalists, far from jumping for joy, lamented the breakthrough. That's when it became clear: They hate us.

“Frustrated with the incessant claims that the Earth would run out of oil, food and raw materials, the economist Julian Simon in 1980 challenged the established beliefs with a bet. He offered to bet $10,000 that any given raw material – to be picked by his opponents – would have dropped in price at least one year later. 

The environmentalists Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren, all of Stanford University, accepted the challenge, stating that "the lure of easy money can be irresistable." The environmentalists staked their bets on chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten, and they picked a time frame of ten years. The bet was to be determined ten years later, assessing whether the real prices had gone up or down. In September 1990 not only had the total basket of raw materials but also each individual raw material dropped in price. Chromium had dropped 5 percent, tin a whopping 74 percent. The doomsayers had lost.

Truth is they could not have won. Ehrlich and Co. would have lost no matter whether they had staked their money on petroleum, food-stuffs, sugar, coffee, cotton, wool, minerals or phosphates. They had all become cheaper.” -Lomborg, Skeptical Environmentalist

"Perhaps the strongest case against the predominance of discrimination as an explanation of economic disparities would be a comparison of blacks in Haiti with blacks in the United States.  Since Haiti became independent two centuries ago, Haitian blacks should be the most prosperous blacks in the hemisphere and American blacks the poorest, if discrimination is the overwhelming factor, but in fact the direct opposite is the case.  It is Haitians who are the poorest and American blacks who are the most prosperous in the hemisphere-- and in the world."  –Thomas Sowell

The latest racial uproars are underway.  But much of the angst, to say nothing of the rioting and beatings, would be avoided if everyone waited for all the facts to come in.

“My experiences of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor be indisposed to serve them: nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”  -Robert E. Lee

“It is a poor center of man’s attention, himself.” -Theodore Dalrymple

I'm bad with names. So I say nobody gets a new name until I've learned everybody's first.

A man on Twitter claims we are all secretly attracted to a very niche kind of adult film.

Bud Light's CIA CEO issued a nonsensical statement which disappointed the left and did nothing to assuage the anger of the right. lol

“It is a belief that seems particularly to beset modern society that believing deeply in something, and following that belief, is the most important thing a person can do….I am here to tell you that it is much less important how committed you are than what you are committed to.” –Antonin Scalia

“As Hitler’s vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to embrace all Europe.  Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed – Nancy would become Nanzig, Besancon Bisanz.  Trondheim would become a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants.  The Alps would be the boundary between ‘the German Empire of the North’, with a new ‘Germania’ as its capital, and ‘the Roman Empire of the South’.  The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter’s Square.  Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant ‘Monument to the Unknown Soldier’.  New crops, such as perennial rye, would be invented.  He would forbid smoking, make vegetarianism compulsory, ‘revive the Cimbrian art of knitting’, appoint a ‘Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs’ and an ‘Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects’.”  -Paul Johnson, Modern Times

26 October 1920:

"Now Hitler turned to the right and left. The national right lacked a social concept, the social left a national one. He admonished the right-wing parties: if you want to be national, then you need to come down to your people's level and do away with all this class conceit! To the left he called: you who have declared your solidarity with the whole world, first show your solidarity with your own national comrades, become Germans first!… You who are truly revolutionaries; come over to us and fight with us for our whole nation! Your place is not over there as drovers for international capital, but with us, with your nation! (Hitler, 1980a, p. 250)

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

Lee Harvey Oswald probably shot JFK.  It's overwhelmingly likely in my view.  Like 1,000,000:1 or more.  I'm going to present to you 28 relevant facts to this case, most of which you won't know.

BTW Crepidarian told me after the show he had too many beers haha

But Thomas Massie isn't.

quotes:

“When you read in the newspaper that the government has taken Walter Williams' guns, then you will know that Walter Williams is dead.”

-Walter Williams

‘a whisper

Which Memory will warehouse as a shout.’  -An unpublished poem by Owen Barfield

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” -James Madison

President Trump has been indicted. This spells the dawn of a new era in our politics.

“Socialism is certain to prove, in the beginning at least, the road NOT to freedom, but to dictatorship and counter-dictatorships, to civil war of the fiercest kind. Socialism achieved and maintained by democratic means seems definitely to belong to the world of utopias.” -W. H. Chamberlin

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” -LP Hartley

I discuss the Nashville monster, including the fact that virtually every media headline conspicuously left out. Instead of blaming any leftwing ideology, the media immediately blamed weapons.

America's core values are crumbling. But why so quickly? 

“There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.” -Thomas Sowell

“There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.” -Thomas Sowell

Republicans in the House have passed a parental rights bill. Love it or hate it, you must admit Republicans and Democrats are no "uniparty."

Kamala Harris is reportedly afraid of messing up so she's paralyzed with fear. It's yet another cruelty offered by affirmative action.

"I have responsibility but no power." -Edsel Ford

In November of 2018, David Frum debated Steve Bannon about populism.  It was supposed to be about whether populism was the future, but in reality the debate boiled down to whether the men liked it or not.

The official resolution was "Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal."

The idea that boys are socialized to be more aggressive is really one of the funniest blank-slate beliefs, because every parent of boys knows that you spend like 80% of your time socializing them out of aggression. -@wayneburkett

Bridget Phetasy was telling us all to stop whining that lockdowns were awesome in March of 2020. Nay, they were going to make us better people. So what really happened?

The correct response to a bully is not to turn the other cheek. I know that's what we are taught, but in my opinion the correct response to a bully is to punch him back. Game theorists might tell you the solution is to usually retaliate, but mix in the occasional forgiveness.

All the reasons which make the initiation of force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative. If some 'pacifist' society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it." -Ayn Rand

"The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard." -Ayn Rand

Often I see parents who have no standards for their children. But they are almost surely lying to themselves and would insist that they do. I'll explain.

"If a young black boy cannot dribble well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an injustice. No one will worry about his single-parent home, the legacy of slavery that still touches his life, or the inherent racial bias in a game invented by a white man. His deficiency will be allowed to be what it is - poor dribbling." -Shelby Steele

“If psychoanalysis had been invented by cavemen, Mankind would still be living in caves.” -Theodore Dalrymple

Normal people sometimes sheepishly preface a truth with “Now I know it’s just anecdotal…” These people haven’t processed the replicability crisis. Your experiences and the studies you and your trusted friends have personally conducted are the best sources you have. 

I annoyed a pink-haired humanist. Which is weird because I'm a human.

“The modern world demands that we approve what it should not even dare ask us to tolerate.” - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

At a certain point you should graduate from going for what is desirable to going for what you desire.

The left can't help but wokify everybody they like from history. Which means all the good characters end up being irreligious, racially hip, and super-cool with gays and the bad ones are George Wallace.

Children deserve a mom and a dad.

Humanity does not suppress an error without simultaneously erasing several truths. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I'm reviewing a lousy debate between Bill Kristol (Conservative) and Scott Horton (Libertarian). 

Oct 4, 2021

Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing. -Alana Newhouse

Ivy League Schools have made entrance tests optional. This will cost unprepared students dearly, but administrators at Ivy League Schools do not act for the benefit of the students primarily. 

Baltimore public schools report zero students are proficient in math. Luckily Fox News woked up the photo so it's ok.

One reason that comedy ages poorly is that whatever it mocks often disappears because it’s been mocked. Combovers, middle aged guys buying sports cars, whatever. One of the reasons “comedy shouldn’t punch down” is so completely wrong. A lot needs changing “down”. 

Sorry for the technical hiccup. I'll try to figure out what happened, check my drivers or smth.

“You may disagree. you may even have evidence to the contrary…but is it worth losing your job over?”  -unknown

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has delivered a highly unusual monologue on his show "Coffee with Scott Adams."

“At a time when compliance is demanded, everyone willing to resist those calls is going to be more than usually needed.”  -Douglas Murray

"In public debate I try always to remain courteous (not with invariable success, but I try). Sometimes this courtesy slides into cowardice, however, my desire not to offend being greater than my attachment to truth, even when untruth (as I see it) is being propounded for someone I believe to be dishonest, unscrupulous or in some other way unworthy, an even when the untruth is a dangerous one. What is a virtue in many circumstances turns into a vice in others." -Theodore Dalrymple

Matt Walsh has given a very frank assessment of trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, who argues for the liberty of doctors to physically, er, "affirm" the gender of children. And everyone showed him how empathetic they were by lambasting his SOUL. 

Puffin is a book publisher who has decided to vandalize one of the greatest childrens' authors in the English language. The author wrote Matilda and James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory only for these ghouls to blot out his words and put in their own, far inferior ones after he's dead. 

"A few days later Muriel, reading over the Seven Commandments to herself, noticed that there was yet another of them which the animals had remembered wrong. They had thought the Fifth Commandment was "No animal shall drink alcohol," but there were two words that they had forgotten. Actually the Commandment read: "No animal shall drink alcohol TO EXCESS." -George Orwell

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

"Nearly 50 million people used weed in 2020, according to SAMHSA’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an increase of nearly 75 percent since 2009." -Politico 

Why do people deny the negative consequences of their preferred policies? Because they're intellectually WEAK.

“Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.” -Aristotle

“Many persons grow insensibly attached to that which gives them a great deal of trouble, as a mother often loves her sick and ever-ailing child better than her more healthy offspring.” -Charles MacKay

An immigrant who twice stabbed people in the past ran over a bunch of pedestrians in Brooklyn. Which of these sweetheart judges, prosecutors, and lawmakers will be held accountable? Probably zero because we, the voting public, do not do so. We are instead animated by the obsessions of CNN.

Pete Buttigieg has emerged! To give us an update on the East Palestine derailment? Nope, to complain about whites doing construction.

"In July 2016, a black man assassinated five police officers and injured nine others in Dallas. The city’s police chief, who was black, left no doubt about motive: “The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.” Here’s what Hillary Clinton tweeted the next day: “White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day.”"  -Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools

Joe Biden delivered the State of the Union speech.  Luckily it didn't take that long for me to watch it since he just screamed over all the applause lines to get the hell out of there.  In any case, I culled my most amusing or interesting reactions down to about 15 minutes here you go.

I listened to the famous episode of Triggernometry which aired last fall.

In it, famous atheist and public intellectual Sam Harris explains in so many words that President Trump has rendered his brain incapable of thought.  He's a man with a tremendously thick bubble who, curiously, is still speaking to those outside of it on occasion so we can take a peek.

Ilhan Omar has lost her place on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Of course, she and her gal pal AOC blamed it on race and gender.

Someone on Twitter asked me why these Democrats are dividing us this way: The simple truth is that's what their far-left, anti-white constituents elect them to do.

"one of the sad changes of the past few years is that I no longer feel any personal loyalty to the progressives I know, to represent their positions as well as possible

I used to do this, to be the great progressive explainer, but there's not enough there anymore"  -purplcabbage

Maybe impolite to ask but in any of these high-profile use of force cases was the victim sober?

The world is full of people who wish to think ill of America.  And most of them would like to be Americans.  –Roger Scruton