Month: June 2020

Walter Williams Points to the Real Problems for Black Americans and It Isn’t Racism

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Williams is an economics professor and also happens to be black.  He points to the fact that the cities that are burning have been run by Democrats and in may cases black Democrats for decades.  Of course the Media will ignore this and just keep shouting Racism!  So what else is new?

Vox Day Has a Very Interesting Essay on Human Society

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The purpose of the article is a book review of Rutger Bregman’s  “Humankind. A Hopeful History” by an anthropologist named  CR Hallpike.  But in refuting Bregman’s theory on how different types of human societies interact he points out the fact that regardless of whether you look at primitive hunter gatherers or modern western populations people distinguish between in group behavior and out group, us versus them.

Vox is touting Dr. Hallpike’s latest book, Darwinism, Dogma, and Cultural Evolution, which I think will be published by Vox Day’s Castalia House imprint.  Seems like an interesting read.  I may pick it up.  Anyway, the essay is long but highly interesting to a non-anthropologist such as myself.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 7 – Catspaw

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Robert Bloch, the sf&f writer who also wrote Psycho wrote this episode.  This episode aired on October 27th 1967 and back then tv shows would have a holiday episode for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.  For the most part, these kinds of shows couldn’t be accommodated on a science fiction series like Star Trek but for some reason they went out of their way to make this travesty.

The Enterprise is exploring a lifeless world.  Sulu, Scotty and a red shirt have fallen out of communication on the surface.  The red shirt calls to be beamed up and when he appears on the Enterprise, he drops down dead.  Now a “spooky” voice tells the Enterprise that the planet is cursed.  Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down and find a silly Halloween set.  There is a castle complete with skeleton filled dungeon, black cat, witches and fog.

We meet a wizard, Korob and his familiar, a black cat who is also a “beautiful” woman named Sylvia.  They have captured Sulu and Scotty and zombified them.  Eventually they zombify McCoy.   They can play tricks like taking a little model of the Enterprise and holding it over a candle to make the real ship start to overheat.  We find out the aliens are creatures from another galaxy and of course they don’t have emotions or other fun stuff so Sylvia makes a play for Kirk.  Kirk pretends to like her but she figures out he’s faking and gets angry.  Now Korob frees them from the dungeon and nervously tells them that they must escape because Sylvia has gone nuts and will destroy them all including him.

She turns into a giant black cat and hunts down and kills Korob by smashing him under a dungeon door.  As he’s dying Korob reveals that the source of their power is a magic wand.  At the key moment Kirk smashes the wand and everything returns to reality.  No castle, no fog and Korob and Sylvia are now these little six-inch figures that look like they are made of colored pipe cleaners.  Scotty, Sulu and McCoy are unzombified and unaware of what has gone on.  Then they go back to the ship.

Even back in 1967 when I was ten years old, I knew this episode sucked.  It has nothing.  They couldn’t even give us a really good-looking woman with not much clothing.  It was all bad.  It isn’t even redeemed by Shatner mockery points.  It’s a waste of time except as an anthropological study on early television holiday tie-ins.  I give it a 3 // 1.

10JUN2020 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Paul Bradford Sees a Future National Leader

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I haven’t had a lot of American Greatness posts lately.  Nothing recently has really grabbed me.  But I have been talking for a while about who will be our leader in another five years.  Paul Bradford throws a name up there and gives his reasons for thinking it.  Senator Cotton deserves credit for not mincing words over how you stop a riot.  That kind of honesty is more not just necessary.  It’s a matter of national life and death.  What was it Lincoln said?  A House divided against itself cannot stand.

Riots Expose Important Divide Among Potential Trump Successors

 

 

Can Minneapolis and New York Come Back?

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Minneapolis and New York.  Here are two cities where the largest constituency in the coalition that keeps the Democrats in perpetual power was given carte blanche to riot, burn and loot whole districts of each city.  The result is similar to what happened in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots in 1992.  But there’s a new twist.  In these two cities the mayors ordered the police to stand down and let the mob riot unopposed.  Essentially the criminals who did all that damage did so without any consequences.  In fact, the rioters were treated as the aggrieved party and the political and law enforcement officials groveled in front of them.

As much as I despise Lori Lightfoot, the odious Mayor of Chicago she at least tried to have the police stop some of the looting.  She blocked off the commercial district to save the property of the Cloud People who are her patrons.  Of course, that didn’t do much for the poorer neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city that were thoroughly looted and burned by the brainless mob and their Antifa leaders.

But that’s an aside.  Where do Minneapolis and New York go from here?  In a year and a half Jacob Frey and Bill de Blasio both end their present miserable terms.  New York will be spared another bout of de Blasio by virtue of term limits.  After his murder of Minneapolis, I’m guessing that hapless Frey will slink away and take up skate boarding.

Is it possible these two cities will reconsider endorsing death by Democrat this time?  Back in the late eighties New York rebounded from David Dinkins’ “gorgeous mosaic” of street crime to elect Rudy Giuliani.  As much as it irked them, Giuliani provided the liberal citizenry of New York with the first competent mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia back in the forties.  Will things be bad enough by 2022 that they’ll once again put in the hated conservative to right the sinking ship?

The same question applies to Minneapolis.  It’s a one-party town in a one-party state.  But could things spin so far out of control that they throw in the towel and elect an actual grown up man who believes that law and order are the bedrock of a functioning society?

The answer is it doesn’t really matter.  Even if both cities elect Republicans to save them the outcome in the long run will still be the same.  I’ve seen the same behavior up here in New England.  Republicans are a kind of pressure relief valve.  Once the locals have indulged their mental illnesses for too long the pressure of all that madness approaches the danger zone and they relieve the pressure by bringing in a Republican to fix things.  I won’t call him a conservative, that would be a ridiculous lie.  It’ll be some libertarian like William Weld or Mitt Romney who’ll do the dirty work of reducing the toxicity of the progressive madness to sub-lethal levels.  But eventually he will be cast out when the next bout of madness strikes the general population.

And that’s what will happen in Minneapolis and New York.  They’ll bring in a fixer who will reduce the insanity just enough to allow whole charade to go on and on forever through cycle after cycle.  I actually wish that the Republicans would just walk away and let the Democrats own this.  New York becoming mega-Detroit seems fitting.  It would be an abomination to see some of the most amazing cultural resources destroyed.  But it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  If New York is utterly destroyed then that is undeniable proof that the assumptions we currently work under are false.  If they don’t work then we must change them.  And changing them is how we get to a rational system in this country.

Think about it.  A white police officer murders a black career criminal.  The police officer is arrested and charged with murder.  And instead of that being the end of the sequence of events, countless thousands of anarchists and looters destroy thousands of businesses, hundreds of policemen are injured and ten or twenty people die.  But just a few years ago, in the same city, a black police officer murdered a white woman who hadn’t done anything at all.  Eventually he was tried and convicted.  But guess how many people rioted, how many businesses were destroyed, how many policemen were injured, how many additional lives were lost because of this reverse situation.  You guessed it, none.  Something is very wrong with this picture and it won’t get better by kneeling to the thugs who are responsible for it.