Month: June 2020

I Suppose This is the Civil War

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When all the major cities in your nation are burning and the police are under attack on the streets they are supposed to protect and the perpetrators are alleged citizens of your country then I guess you could call that civil war.

It’s a little hard to know because similar things have happened a number of times before and each time, we had some other name.  Unrest, outrage, protest.  And the actions of Antifa muddy the waters somewhat because they are anarchists and in a sense aren’t normal Americans (whatever that means today).  But with whatever caveats and reservations attached, there are now two groups in this country that cannot be reconciled to each other.  One group has allegiance to the American republic that existed before the 1960s and another one that wants to tear all that down.

The 2020 election will be a proxy for this clash.  We’ll see if the center can hold.  The danger is whether enough women will be cowed by the violence and capitulate.  Women (and millennials) are easily frightened and also easily manipulated by the media.  It plays on their emotions and elicits feelings of fear and guilt by confusing who is the victim and who is the perpetrator; what is reasonable and what is rash; what is justified and what is cruel.

I said the election is a proxy for the war but won’t end it either way.  If President Trump wins, which I think he will, the other side will get even crazier.  It’s hard to imagine how they’ll top this week but they will.  At this point I don’t think there is any action that is out of the question from their side.  And I mean that literally.

Now, if they win, I expect a combination of things.  There will be a lot of that talk about reaching across the aisle and reaching consensus as a smokescreen for a barrage of executive orders to consolidate control of the population.  This will involve first and second amendment curtailments.

So, either way the war will go on but I won’t pretend I don’t care who wins the election.  Winning it is the chance to act openly and stick it to our enemies.  Winning this election will finally win the Battle of the Supreme Court.  And I see that as the only avenue to finally liberate our side from the unconstitutional restrictions on free association and all the other infringements that the social justice regime has inflicted on us over the last fifty years.  Red States can write their own laws and an originalist Supreme Court can back their play and unchain the American people from virtual slavery.

Looking at the rioting and looting that has gone on in the last few days I think we may be looking at an inflection point.  New York came back from bankruptcy and anarchy in the late 80s by facing down the ancestors of the people who ripped it apart this week.  Back then they said to the criminals and losers that they wouldn’t allow lawlessness to destroy the life of the city.  But I don’t think that’s going to happen again.  The rich have coopted the neighborhoods that the middle class lived in.  They’ve filled the city with hipsters and other idiot relations of the rich.  Those people will fold like a cheap suit.  They will grovel in front of the underclass that just burned their city down.  But the major change now will be the nature of law enforcement in New York.  The cops’ hands were tied after the Black Lives Matter travesty during the Obama administration and they backed off and let crime blossom.  But that will be nothing compared to the new balance of power.  First off there will be a move to replace white men with women and minorities in a wholesale fashion in the NYPD.  And the new “more humane” laws will be a dream come true for criminals of all stripes.  But it will turn the city into a nightmare for businessmen and honest citizens in general.  I expect flight from New York to be a long term and possibly terminal event.

The rioting has done great damage to property and has demoralized the people living there.  But the event is an object lesson for anyone who is unsure of what each side stands for.  The Democrats will sacrifice the livelihood and even the lives of its citizens to appease a mob of irrational people who also happen to vote for them.  Appeasement is their stock in trade.  If you’d rather that the government protected and respected the honest hardworking people out there then you’ll have to join our side of the Civil War.

03JUN2020 – Quote of the Day

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Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3, Lines 17-67

 

(WESTMORELAND)

O that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work to-day!

 

(KING HENRY V)

What’s he that wishes so?

My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:

If we are mark’d to die, we are enow

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,

Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;

It yearns me not if men my garments wear;

Such outward things dwell not in my desires:

But if it be a sin to covet honour,

I am the most offending soul alive.

No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:

God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour

As one man more, methinks, would share from me

For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart; his passport shall be made

And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

We would not die in that man’s company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This day is called the feast of Crispian:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.

And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day: then shall our names.

Familiar in his mouth as household words

Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

William Shakespeare

02JUN2020 – Quote of the Day

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Richard III, Act I, Scene 1, Lines 1-41

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;

And now, instead of mounting barded steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the king

In deadly hate the one against the other:

And if King Edward be as true and just

As I am subtle, false and treacherous,

This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,

About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’

Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here

Clarence comes.

 

William Shakespeare

Does Raising a Family in a Large American City Make Any Possible Sense?

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About 33 years ago I moved out of New York City.  Now I was born and bred there.  My family had lived there for four generations.  I liked the amenities that the City possessed.  I could take the kids to Central Park and to the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We could go to a Yankee or Met game, go to the beach, go fishing out of Sheepshead Bay.  It was my home.  I liked my neighbors.  But this was in the mid-eighties and things had gotten steadily more dangerous even in a relatively “safe” neighborhood like the one I lived in.  Muggers had taken to getting off the expressways in “safe” neighborhoods early in the morning and mugging old ladies as they walked to Early Mass at church.  And they didn’t just get robbed they were often brutalized pretty badly.  Apparently, a baseball bat to the shoulder from behind is an excellent way to make an old lady drop her pocketbook.  And thinking about what it would cost to put my young children in good schools in New York just wasn’t in the cards for me at that time.  So, we moved out into the “country.”  Or so we called it.  Really it was outer suburbia in New England but there were farms and cows and so we told our kids they lived in the country.  Fast forward twenty-five years and we moved again out of the “country” because it became too crowded.

And that’s just what growth looks like.  Instead of 275 million people now there are 330 million people.  But moving from outer suburbia to a more rural area is a matter of choice and temperament, not a life or death decision.  I like more trees and fewer stop lights.  I want a quiet environment rather than a busy commercial strip.  But the next guy might like to live in a small town so he can walk to get his cup of coffee and doughnut.  He likes to have a French restaurant and a yoga studio a few blocks away.  Vive la différence.

But instead, let’s say you live in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Baltimore or even my old home town of New York City.  For the sake of argument let’s say you live right outside of New York City in a very expensive suburb.  You pay an enormous amount of money to buy a house there and you pay taxes that are almost obscene.  Let’s say the schools are good and the amenities in your town are excellent.  Great restaurants and stores.  Good health clubs and a very nice golf course that you enjoy.  And crime is reasonable.  Sure, there are property crimes that happen, burglaries and car theft but violent crime while not unknown is infrequent because you have a good police force that prevents that sort of thing.  Your very nice gated community is a haven from the urban existence that you can see on the horizon.

But then something happens.  A cop in a city with a Democratic mayor kills a black man during an arrest.  And he does it in front of a video camera and it looks terrible.  People in this liberal city in this liberal state feel outraged.  The very liberal mayor fires the cops involved and says an investigation will judge whether the law was broken.  Nothing unusual there.  This has happened before.  But this mayor is extremely weak.  When the protests begin, he warns the police to back off.  They do.  And the protestors are heavily infiltrated by Antifa and anarchists and probably BLM.  They don’t just protest.  They riot, loot and burn down a sizable area of the downtown.  Does the mayor decide to put a stop to the violence after that?  Far from it.  He orders the police to abandon their precinct to the mob.  Now the devastation becomes extensive and drunk with the victory of the city’s capitulation they decide to extend their reign of terror and head out into the suburbs of the next city over.  And when the Democratic governor realizes that the Mayor is useless, he proves that he is equally useless and only sends a few hundred National Guardsmen in and mostly just to guard the electric power station and Federal Reserve Bank building.  So now the rioters are free to continue their arson and looting.

After this has gone on for a day or two the inner-city denizens and the local Antifa cohorts in every major city decide it’s time to set up a local chapter of burn everything down and steal whatever comes to hand.  So now it gets real for you.  You’re watching on tv as the metropolis that’s fifteen minutes away begins to go up in flames and the cops stand down at the behest of Bill de Blasio in order not to annoy his constituency while they enjoy their first amendment right to loot and burn other people’s life’s savings.  And in a video on social media you hear the rioters tell you, seemingly you in particular, that they’re headed out to your suburb to bring the same treatment to you and yours.

Well, that’s got to be an eye opener.  And the more you think about it the more you realize that there’s not a damn thing anyone is going to do to end this cycle.  This happens periodically.  First it happened in 1965, then in 1977.  In the late seventies through the early nineties it never really stopped.  The violence and crime were continuous.  Giuliani was a change in New York.  He was the last gasp of a majority that would allow the police to keep the criminal elements under strict control.  The nineties were peaceful and prosperous for New York.  But Giuliani was term limited out in 2001.  Bloomberg left the police in place but constantly railed against them in the press.  By the time Obama and de Blasio were in the White House and Gracie Mansion respectively, it was open season on the police and law and order too.  Eric Holder demonized the police and spawned Black Lives Matter.  Now you could say that President Trump is a reaction to Obama and the Ferguson scam that keeps being perpetrated on the people.  And he can do a lot to prevent this stuff spreading to red states.  But if you live in a blue state and especially if you live close to one of the big cities in them you are at ground zero for every wave of the roller coaster.

And that brings me to my point.

Move.

There’s no good reason to live there.  The bad reasons are that it’s your home.  And it’s where your family lives.  I don’t live near one of the big cities but I wish I were a thousand miles away in a red state.  But I have kids and grandkids that have roots here.  And every day I try to figure out how to get us all out.  But if you’re starting out now or are going to start a family, get out now.  Head south and west and look for a state that is run by normal people and isn’t filled with people who don’t have any stuff but want your stuff instead.  I assure you from sad experience, it’s no way to live.