All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Publius Decius Mus (aka Michael Anton) seems to always be a go-to guy for every important argument. And birthright citizenship is no exception. Listen to Tucker Carlson question him on the history of the 14th Amendment and why it has been used to justify giving the children of illegal immigrants automatic citizenship.
Very useful information to have when you want to answer some idiot like Paul Ryan.
I thought this might be fun so me and a few friends will be using the comments section to discuss the results on election night (Tuesday November 6th). Just for kicks I attached a poll to this post to see if there are any other interested parties.
[socialpoll id=”2525156″]
What can I say about perfection? Watch it and laugh.
I Think My Dog’s a Democrat Bryan Lewis Official Video
I guess I have to address the shooter in Pittsburgh (Robert Bowers). What can we say about him? Ideologically he felt the Jewish people were a threat to him. In his mind what he did was justified. That much we know from his statements. But why did he do it? I’m guessing that he no longer felt what he had to lose outweighed his desire for vengeance. And I’m guessing this is the same situation as that other shooter who went after the Republican Congressional Softball Team last year (James T. Hodgkinson). Another man who was willing to trade his life for a chance to kill his ideological enemies.
Looking at the details of both men’s lives, it appears that neither one would be leaving behind anyone he cared about as much as the cause he was consumed by. Both men were basically unemployed and neither had a happy home life. Specifically, Hodgkinson was in a failed marriage and wasn’t making ends meet with a home inspection business. Bowers is an unemployed truck driver living alone. Both men were obsessed with political and ideological agendas and both felt that things were going badly and it required them to take violent action to redress the situation. I think it would be accurate to say they were both consumed with hatred.
People say that what they each did was insane. When something like this occurs both sides of the political spectrum agree that monstrous evil has occurred and that no sane person could be responsible. And they would be right. Only a madman would do something like this.
But here’s the question. Are there circumstances under which anyone would do the same thing? Pick the most pacifistic individual, Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Theresa. Is it conceivable that even these two would find circumstances under which they would commit homicide and think it necessary? It’s pretty hard to believe. But if there were innocents being harmed and no other way to save them it’s conceivable that this might be sufficient. Now look at the other end of the compassion spectrum. Think of violent sociopaths who basically have as little compunction about murder as we have for swatting a mosquito. What motivation would they need to snuff out the lives of their neighbors? Very little, maybe the possibility of stealing some cash or just for the diversion the killing would provide.
In between these two extremes is everyone else. That includes you and me and Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, the Pope, the Ayatollah Khamenei, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Brett Kavanaugh, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers and all the gang-bangers, drug lords and terrorists (IRA, ISIS, al Qaeda, Shining Path, Tamil Tigers, Neo-Nazis, KKK, etc.). It also includes great aunt Sadie, your priest or minister or rabbi and even the kid playing baseball at the local ball field.
In my estimation it’s a continuum that depends on the nature of the individual and the pressure being brought to bear to extract revenge or prevent an attack on something you value highly. The equation is when you determine that the value of your life falls below the value of the damage prevented by some act of violence the individual will act. And for every single human that equation is different. Police put their lives on the line every day. In the old days just about any man would have thrown himself in front of a gunman to save his wife (times may have changed for the millennials). Al Qaeda inspired its members to fly planes into buildings to redress perceived western assaults on Islam. In each case the agent is doing what he thinks is the right thing and feels logically justified in sacrificing his life.
My whole point is that in the case of the two shooters each decided that his actions and the price he would pay for them was justified under his circumstances. Right now, we are seeing the mentally unstable with nothing to lose determining that desperate acts make sense. We don’t want to get to a place where this calculation occurs to more and more people. A factor that is working for us currently is the robust economy. Unemployment is receding drastically. That should help greatly in reducing desperation. What isn’t helping right now is the political polarization that has engulfed us. That will have the opposite effect, amping up the irritation felt by ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum.
These shooters are the weak links. Their personal situations and the fervor with which they feel the ideological strain of day to day circumstances made them the snap first. But there will be more. If Professor Codevilla is right then this is the tip of the iceberg. This is the microscopic effect. Civil Strife or War is the macroscopic equivalent. If too many people reach that breaking point then a chain reaction will occur and that will be unstoppable. Codevilla thinks we’re already there. Let’s hope he’s wrong. I’ve got a lot to lose and I’ll bet you do too.
Vox and the Z-Man have posts up on the shutting down of Gab.
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15418
https://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/10/they-cant-say-i-didnt-warn-them_28.html
There are a few ways of talking about this. First off, we can discuss what is lost by a Gab shutdown. Personally, I’ve never really completely understood Twitter or Gab. It just seemed like everyone linking to everyone else but not actually reading the content. What the actual value of that is escapes me. I tried reading my linked content many times and found it a muddled mess. Maybe that’s what happens when a million people are mixed in a blender together. But I will confess I probably just didn’t know what I was doing. So, all in all from a personal point of view it won’t actually affect me. Now, maybe it has actually been useful for other folks for communication and publicity. If anyone has found it valuable, say so in the comments. But from my point of view it wasn’t very useful.
The next way we can look at it is what can we learn from how it was shut down. Andrew Torba was vehement that he wanted freedom of speech to be the defining characteristic of Gab. That sounds like a laudable ideal. In practice, however, the content became pretty foul. There were some pretty crazy people on the site. Now, it’s unclear how much was just trolling by those looking to destroy Gab and which was legitimate nutbaggery. But regardless, the result was unpleasant and chaotic. Not being a Twitter user maybe I’m just unaware that this is par for the course in a social media arena. If that is so then it sort of reinforces my impression that Twitter and all these social media environments are toxic places that are mostly about battling your enemies for sport. I run a very different type of website. It’s a microscopic place compared to Gab (never mind Twitter). But we have to deal with the same questions of how to regulate the written interactions between real people. I have the advantage that I can monitor the discussions on my own. The scope is possible in a small venue. For a place like Twitter or Gab it becomes expensive and difficult to maintain a consistent policy because of the need for multiple individuals with their individual points of view. With respect to freedom of speech on my site, I tell people they can speak their minds but keep it reasonable. Obviously, that isn’t a highly precise statement. What I’m trying to say is stay within legal and cultural norms. Different people have different perspectives on those and the only standard that I have to decide on what conforms and what doesn’t is my own judgement. But that isn’t too different from any other venue where people interact and debate. I’m guessing that a truly free speech site will always be a sort of giant demolition derby. If your site is perceived as being on the right-wing it is clear that you will be punished whenever the opportunity presents itself so allowing the crazier individuals to let it all hang out will eventually lead to the situation that occurred at Gab. So, the lesson to learn is a fully free speech site is not going to happen in the present environment.
And finally, we can look at what should be changed to avoid this waste of resources. The first thing that comes to mind is an analysis could be done to find out exactly what are the useful functions that a Twitter, Facebook or YouTube serves and how, if at all, they could be replicated in a competing right-wing entity. I am hardly qualified to do such an analysis but I’ll at least attempt to discuss some of the more obvious answers. The two most important functions these sites accomplish is communication and commerce. The sites allow people to find their audience. To the extent that they are right-wing sites I guess that will help pre-select for the audience intended. The second function is allowing content creators to monetize their product. This will be tied into advertising revenue. From what I’ve heard advertising revenues, even on established giants like YouTube and Instagram, are shrinking drastically. What I think this all means is that a viable right-wing social media site will be a site where content providers will pay a fee to obtain visibility and the site will provide amenities like video storage space, band-width and some amount of moderation of the trolls. Eventually, popular content producers will be able to sell advertising on their videos and other content products. To me this seem to be the future of right-wing social media. And it seems like a reasonable model. Eventually the site will develop other ways to monetize its value. Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon eventually will be the end state.
So that’s my take on what can be learned from the Gab debacle. Experience is the cruelest teacher but the most effective.
Codevilla’s lengthy article outlining the path forward he sees for the American republic is ricocheting around the right-wing blogosphere pretty heavily. And that makes sense. Here is a civic nationalist of unimpeachable credentials sadly confirming what the Dissident Right has been saying for several years. Codevilla’s thesis is that we’ve gone over the cliff and there’s no going back to a united America.
Without a doubt, the naïve belief that a third of the population can publicly foment the disenfranchisement of 60% of the population without damaging the unity and even the existence of the nation has been exploded. But does that mean that a coalition of people (of whatever ethnicity) who would prefer to live in a country corresponding to the pre-1965 way of life can’t be cobbled together? Of that, I’m not convinced. The Left has appealed to all the various grievances of women, minorities and sexual deviants against the traditional society as a way to build a coalition. But what would happen if you take away the advantage for that coalition? What if protected status was removed from these categories so that there was no longer any advantage to uniting under the banner of victimhood? Suddenly moslems, feminists and trans-women don’t seem to have that much in common. Just looking at the various minority groups, it doesn’t appear that East and South Asians have very much in common with Hispanics who don’t really get along very well with black folk. Suddenly it makes a lot more sense for all of us to play by the rules that actually protect each group from the law of the jungle. The real losers in this type of situation would be the really weird characters in the LGBTQ camp. It’s pretty certain that there are much worse societies to be noticeably strange than in pre-1965 America. Just ask the queer folk in Iran (if you could find any alive that is). And considering the recent statistics on female college degrees and employment advancement I think women are the least entitled to demand special privileges.
I think what made the social and political situation in the last couple of decades seem like a lost cause to the Right was the fact that the only Republican leaders that we had on the scene weren’t really on our side. Even in the short time that Donald Trump has been on the scene and even hog-tied as he has been by the machinations of the Deep State it’s obvious that our ideas are not unacceptable to the American electorate. Imagine if a relatively united Republican establishment started to actually espouse the welfare of its constituency on a consistent basis. I think we could easily sway many of the groups that currently vote in lock step with the Democrats. What is needed is an assertive stance in demanding the end of unconstitutional practices that disadvantage and disrespect the majority of American citizens in the name of grievances that have no basis in reality. The American legal system provides more than sufficient protection for all law-abiding individuals and the American business climate when nurtured by a responsible government provides opportunities to thrive for anyone who wants to work.
Anyway, that’s my take on the situation. That’s why I haven’t despaired yet for the ability of America to revive. I’m not saying any of this will happen. I’m speculating that it could be done. I also freely admit that it’s a long shot. But if recent history has shown us anything it’s that long shots do actually happen.
I’m interested in your opinions. Do you agree with Codevilla that all that’s left is dividing up the country or that there’s still a path forward for a United States. Feel free to leave your comments below.
Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween
In the first installment of this post I documented my education into the real world of scientists, how they saved the world from giant mutated insects and invented important stuff like flying cars. That time period was the 1960s. It was a carefree time full of youthful high jinx such as race riots and the Manson Family. Fast forward thirty years to 1993. A little movie came out called Matinee. It was about the 1960s. The movie employs a device that I like to call “a movie within a movie.” It’s called that because within the movie you are watching there is a movie being watched by the characters in the movie! It’s a wild concept.
The name of this internal movie is MANT. That’s a portmanteau for man-ant. The eponymous victim of this movie has been transformed from a man into a hybrid man/ ant creature. Once again radiation is involved and eventually the MANT reaches gigantic proportions. And right on schedule arrives the scientist that has glasses and a beard and explains all the technical jargon about this scientific problem. And by an amazing coincidence it’s our old friend Dr. “You’re Wiser Than We Are” from “The Thing from Another World” (Robert Cornthwaite). I mean, what are the odds? He makes such valuable pronouncements as “human/insect mutations are far from an exact science” and “My friend, you’ve suffered some of the worst that our little friend the atom has to offer. It can power a city or level it!”
I was fascinated by the changes I noted in Cornthwaite between the time he was in “The Thing” and “Mant”. No longer was he sympathetic toward the monsters. His allegiance had shifted back to humanity. I attributed this change to the smoldering resentment he felt after the Thing back-handed him into a wall in the earlier movie. Such ingratitude by the monster pushed our friend back into the Humanity First camp once again. I knew this was valuable information. I wrote it down!
Outside of the movie Mant (but inside of Matinee) a teenage girl (played by Lisa Jakub) is swept up in the drama surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis (and the premiere of Mant) in the southern Florida town of Key West. This girl is the daughter of beatniks and she has her world view changed by exposure to a young Navy brat who also happens to like horror movies. When the movie ends Lisa has gotten over her prejudices against military families and monster movies. What does this have to do with this post? Well it does link us back to the military but hang in there. I have another half-baked segue coming up.
Fast forward to 1998 and a blockbuster called Independence Day erupts onto the cinematic stage. Now it just so happens that there is an ex-Navy pilot named Russel Kay and by a strange coincidence (or is it) his daughter is played by Lisa Jakub! But her love of a navy brat in the last movie has landed her in this movie in a family headed by a delusional alcoholic ex-military flier. Although it’s not apparent how she feels about horror movies she definitely suffers some of the worst of what our friends the aliens have to offer. In Independence Day, the role of scientist is handled by Jeff Goldblum. He is an environmentalist computer scientist who’s always worried about recycling and is totally opposed to nuking the aliens. He’s worried that fallout is worse than extermination of the entire human race by death rays. But by the end of the movie he comes around and cheerfully nukes the aliens on their home base.
I was thinking of dragging this forward by following President Whitmore forward into Lake Placid (well the crocodile is very large) or following Jeff Goldblum into Jurassic Park and Independence Day 2 which has all kinds of scientific mumbo-jumbo and giant creatures but I’m getting tired.
Suffice it to say that even really stupid people and fat-headed scientists can see reality if monsters and giant insects start slapping them around.
And now my patient readers, the payoff.
All of this research has allowed me to formulate a unified theory of scientific behavior. Apparently all scientists are morons and can only learn about reality by being hit over the head by it. Therefore, I propose a new policy. Whenever a scientist dictates a policy based on fat-headed stupidity he should be forced to endure the solution himself until he either sees the error of his way or dies from the paradox of settled science.
For instance, if a climate scientist declares CO2 the death of the planet then he should not produce any of it himself. Now, I don’t propose that he cease breathing. Even though technically respiration is nothing but exchanging O2 for CO2. Let’s just let him slide on the breathing. But that’s all. No internal combustion engines or heating systems or electricity. In fact, nothing produced by technology supported by the industrial revolution. So that also eliminates batteries and solar cells and everything else made in a factory. And finally, I remind everyone that burning coal or oil or even wood produces CO2. So, this scientist is telling us to give up every bit of science going all the way back to the paleolithic age. So, let us limit our friend the scientist to killing fur-bearing animals and eating their flesh and wearing their pelts for warmth. Of course, he’s probably a vegan but we all have to make compromises when inconsistencies crop up.
That’s my plan in a nutshell. It should be amusing to see Al Gore dressed like Fred Flintstone and trying to catch a squirrel for breakfast.
In an earlier post I said that Angelo Codevilla’s article was sure to be interesting and depressing. And so it is. Basically he seems to concur with the Dissident Right on the point that there is no longer any going back to one America. His thesis is that the Progressives have let the genie fully out of the bottle and the Right is now radicalized to the point that there will be an unending ratcheting up of tactics on both sides. And he does not think political victory by the Right will deter the Left. They are now in the go for broke business. And of course the most apt metaphor for this situation is the Corcyran Civil War in Thucydides. There we see class warfare unleashed to its most diabolical conclusion, complete annihilation of the hated enemy down to the last man. The only ray of sunshine allowed is if Republicans win the next few elections we’ll able to convince the Progressives to peacefully divide the country into mutually exclusive populations of us and them. So the story is bleak.
Luckily I’m an optimist. I still think we may beat the bastards. But I don’t say Mr. Codevilla can’t be right. He makes a convincing case. Well, I’m still staying up for the Mid-Terms. They should be very instructive.
It’s a very long article and there are no laughs but if you are interested in a political perspective on the Resistance and what it will spawn from a very thoughtful writer of the Right you might want to read this. If you want the Cliff Notes version I’d say start prepping for the troubles.
Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween
On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid I used to watch Million Dollar Movie on Channel 11 and was able to enjoy such science fiction classics as “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” Right away I figured out that really big creatures that had been exposed to atomic radiation really liked to attack. But as I became more sophisticated in my sci-fi viewing I eschewed such childish cinematic offerings in favor of more cerebral tales. No more ridiculous giant crab stories. I graduated to “Them” which is the realistic depiction of an attack by giant ants exposed to atomic radiation. In this classic of the fifties I learned that scientists were old and wore glasses and looked like Santa Claus (except for the girl scientists who were young and didn’t even look like Mrs. Claus and tended to end up with the FBI agent who starred in the film, who in this case was James Arness of Gunsmoke fame). And the best ones had British accents (or at worst New England accents). Also, no matter what their area of specialization (e.g., physics, botany or myrmecology) they were all equally adept at battling giant creatures exposed to atomic radiation. And they were full of esoteric and valuable information. I found out that the plural of antenna wasn’t antennas but rather antennae! This inspired in me a life-long love of the classical Greek and Latin languages. And the most important characteristic of scientists was their love of knowledge. Because of this thirst for knowledge, they were willing to venture into tunnels and basements where even the ubiquitous soldiers in their WWII vintage uniforms were afraid to go. It also meant the scientists were very likely to be munched on by the mutant du jour of the story. But you know, science. So that is how I came to admire scientists. They were cool and smart too. And they always, always, always figured out how to kill the monsters.
But one Saturday, Million Dollar Movie was playing another sci-fi film, “The Thing from Another World.” I was suspicious at first. If it was from another world how did it get here? Had it been exposed to atomic radiation? Would there be enough scientists? These doubts plagued me. But I decided to give it a whirl. Encouraging signs emerged quickly. The creature was indeed radioactive and there was a whole passel of scientists assigned to this movie. One of them even had a New England accent so things seemed to check out. And reassuringly the US military was available for monster eradication duty once the scientists had done the heavy lifting of analysis. Early on a problem arose. This creature was man shaped. He was bald and had strange hands with hypodermic finger nails. But he was no more than eight feet tall. This was highly irregular and seemed to throw into doubt his qualifications for his own movie. Also the scientists in this movie were extremely assertive and gave the military officers a lot of lip. And it seemed they didn’t know their primary function, figure out how to kill the monster. This was very confusing. The leader of the scientists kept saying that regardless of how many humans the creature killed, science demanded that no force should be used against it. He kept saying (in a really annoying intonation) that the creature “is wiser than we are” and that “it’s our duty to die to preserve the knowledge this creature possesses.” Even as a youngster I intuited that this head scientist was what we called back then “a loser.” How could this be? He was a scientist! He had the answers. I found this very puzzling and dispiriting. I searched for some reason for this failure on the scientist’s part to want to kill the monster. Eventually I developed an hypothesis based on a detailed comparison of “Them” and “The Thing from Another World.” At first glance nothing jumped out. But once I checked the cast members it all became clear. As mentioned above, in “Them” the part of the FBI Agent and eventual boyfriend of the scientist’s daughter is played by James Arness of “Gunsmoke” fame. It turned out that the part of the Thing was played by none other than James Arness! Well obviously if Arness was the prospective son-in-law of one scientist, then it stood to reason that a fellow scientist would not turn on him. What was at work here was the kind of professional courtesy that, for instance, police confer on each other’s family members. Now it made perfect sense. Crisis averted. I could become a scientist without becoming a loser. But I was troubled by all that talk of monsters being wiser than us. And not killing them but instead letting them kill us. It was very strange.
Fast forward forty years. I work as an engineer. I am surrounded by R&D PhDs. They all look and sound like the head scientist in “The Thing from Another World.” They drive Priuses and have Tolerance and Coexist, Bernie and Free Tibet bumper stickers on their cars. And suddenly it all makes sense.
Hard to believe NBC News is talking sense. They are comparing the hard left turn the Democrats took in 1972 to the freak show that’s happening today. Of course the difference is that the number of imbeciles has increased significantly in the interim. But for anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex the spectacle on display during the Kavanaugh meltdown should have been sufficient to scare him off the Democrat side.
Pretty good read. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-will-democrats-do-midterms-richard-nixon-s-1972-re-ncna923076