17NOV2023 – Quote of the Day

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Tubal Cain

OLD Tubal Cain was a man of might

In the days when earth was young:

By the fierce red light of his furnace bright

The strokes of his hammer rung;

And he lifted high his brawny hand

On the iron glowing clear,

Till the sparks rush’d out in scarlet showers,

As he fashion’d the sword and spear.

And he sang – “Hurrah for my handiwork!

Hurrah for the spear and sword!

Hurrah for the hand that shall wield them well,

For he shall be king and lord!’

 

To Tubal Cain came many a one,

As he wrought by his roaring fire,

And each one pray’d for a strong steel blade

As the crown of his desire;

And he made them weapons sharp and strong,

Till they shouted loud for glee,

And gave him gifts of pearls and gold,

And spoils of the forest free.

And they sang – “Hurrah for Tubal Cain,

Who hath given us strength anew!

Hurrah for the smith, hurrah for the fire,

And hurrah for the metal true!”

 

But a sudden change came o’er his heart

Ere the setting of the sun,

And Tubal Cain was fill’d with pain

For the evil he had done;

He saw that men, with rage and hate,

Made war upon their kind,

That the land was red with the blood they shed

In their lust for carnage, blind.

And he said – “Alas! that ever I made,

Or that skill of mine should plan,

The spear and the sword for men whose joy

Is to slay their fellow-man!”

 

And for many a day old Tubal Cain

Sat brooding o’er his woe;

And his hand forebore to smite the ore,

And his furnace smoulder’d low.

But he rose at last with a cheerful face,

And a bright courageous eye,

And bared his strong right arm for work,

While the quick flames mounted high.

And he sang – “Hurrah for my handiwork!”

And the red sparks lit the air;

“Not alone for the blade was the bright steel made;”

And he fashion’d the first ploughshare!

 

And men, taught wisdom from the past,

In friendship join’d their hands,

Hung the sword in the hall, the spear on the wall,

And plough’d the willing lands;

And sang – “Hurrah for Tubal Cain!

Our stanch good friend is he;

And for the ploughshare and the plough

To him our praise shall be.

But while Oppression lifts its head,

Or a tyrant would be lord,

Though we may thank him for the plough,

We’ll never forget the sword!”

Charles Mackay

South Park is Making Disney Lose Billions of Dollars

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Anyone who has kids or grandkids is aware that Disney has been on a jihad to “diversify” their movies and tv shows.  This entails replacing characters who in earlier stories were male or white or sexually normal with women and specifically non-white women and very specifically non-white, queer women.  This was very noticeable in the Star Wars franchise where all the heroes are now women and all the men are either lame or evil.

But that was only the beginning.  Next comes the princess movies.  Apparently the irony of a character named Snow White who isn’t white was too complex for Disney.  And diversity has become the marching orders going forward in the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU).  So the old white male heroes like Iron Man and Captain America have been either killed off or put out to pasture and a new generation has been introduced.  So we’ll be getting Black Captain America and Black Spider Man.  But the most egregious example of DEI awfulness is the female Marvel superheroes.  And now that innovation has born fruit, poisonous fruit.  Whereas previously they produced Captain Marvel, we now have “The Marvels.”  That’s blonde haired Captain Marvel joined by two diverse and empowered female heroes who battle against a female super-villain and “don’t need no men to get in their way.”

The reviews of this movie have been scathing.  Apparently when you make message fiction it’s not necessary to have a coherent plot or likeable characters or even a recognizable beginning, middle and end.  You just stop when the special effects guys run out of stuff.

Well, there is no need to complain about this movie.  Making the Marvels was its own punishment.  Based on its opening box office, the movie is already predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.  And all this pandering to diversity has inspired the South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone to create an episode that mocks Disney’s endless crusade to artificially diversify their movies.  In this episode Cartman finds himself both transformed into a diverse woman and also assuming the place of Disney’s diversifier in chief; producer Kathleen Kennedy.  In this guise Cartman endlessly orders the showrunners for his movies to “put a chick in it and make it lame and gay.”  Here’s the “not safe for work version.”

And now both Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Iger of Disney have made public statements complaining about what’s going on.  Kennedy has stated that South Park is causing Disney fans to think poorly of Disney’s movies and that is causing the poor box office.  She hints that legal action is forthcoming.

Iger is a little more grounded in reality.  He admits that a portion of Disney’s audience really is consciously unhappy with what he calls Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion program.  And he states quite openly that his solution to this situation will be to “double down” on more diversity, equity and inclusion.

You’ve got to respect his honesty.  Okay.  In the face of a string of movies and tv shows that because of the emphasis on unentertaining social messaging have bombed at the box office Disney is going to give us an even stronger dose of social messaging.  The beatings will continue until moral improves.

This is pretty great.  Disney is a corporate behemoth.  They’ve had a built in cash machine tied to the American family for generations.  And now they’re committing public suicide just to prove they can do it.  Well, how stupid do their competition have to be.  They should jump at the chance to provide these families with exactly what they used to get from Disney.  Hire some decent writers who don’t hate normal people.  Pay the special effects people to animate it and get rich.  Give them knock-offs of all the Disney and Star Wars and Marvel stuff but without “putting a chick in it and making it lame and gay.”

There. That’s not so hard to figure out, is it?

Late Night photog

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photog – Welcome back to the show.  During the commercial break Senator Spekanaty had to leave to catch his flight back to DC.  But our next guest will be sure to please.  Of course, after his tour de force performance at the fourth Republican 2024 presidential primary debate he needs no introduction.  Give a big welcome to Great Old One, Cthulhu.

Off to the side of photog’s desk a large video screen lights up and shows the six-hundred-foot-tall squid-headed dragon seated on his throne inside his lair.  At his side is a hundred-foot-high glass bowl containing about forty live humans cowering at the bottom.  While speaking to the late night tv show host the eldritch god would occasionally reach into the bowl and pop one of the people in his mouth, much as one of us would eat a peanut from a bowl while speaking on the phone.

CTHULHU – Thank you photog.  You’re much too kind.  I merely provided a much-needed clarification on how to ensure civility and avoid confusion during these political debates.  If a pathological liar like Christie is allowed to continuously muddy the waters with misinformation about the possibility of reforming the federal government, why, people are liable to lose faith in the basic goodness of public servants.  In good faith I couldn’t allow that to continue.  Also, I was feeling a might peckish and he looked juicy and delicious.

photog – But weren’t you afraid that devouring the former governor of New Jersey would strike the wrong note when you were trying to represent Donald Trump to the audience of that debate?

CTHULHU – Why photog I don’t see how that could be.  For weeks everyone has been complaining about how candidates like Christie and Pence were wasting space on the stage that the front-runners should be using to explain their platforms to the Republican voters.  Pence had the decency to bow out.  Since Christie refused, I merely gave him an assist.

photog – So you feel no remorse?

CTHULHU – Remorse?  No.  Maybe a slight gall bladder attack.  Chris really packs a punch when it comes to the triglycerides.  Woof!  But look, we’ve got to get our message out.  Lots of people have lost faith after the events of 2020.  We’ve got to show we’re serious about reforming the federal government and clearly working within the bureaucracy’s rulebook is only going to result in the same failures we saw before.  Clearly bold and innovative methods are necessary.

photog – And eating up thousands of employees of the administrative state is that method?

CTHULHU – Hey look.  I’ve been restructuring dysfunctional organizations for a couple of billion years now both within this space-time continuum and without.  And I’ve never seen anything that gets the job done faster and better than chowing down on the dead wood that are standing in the way of progress.  And in fact, think of how this method also works to decrease the deficit and debt situation.  Every civil servant I eat is one less parasite drawing a salary and eventually a pension from the US Treasury.  It’s clearly a win-win.

photog – But couldn’t you just fire them?

CTHULHU – How cute!  You think that Washington works that way.  Trust me, you’ll be dead and buried before any FBI, IRS or State Department hack gets fired by the next Republican administration.  No, it’s eat them or nothing.  There’s no third way.

photog – Well, I guess you know what’s best.  But can you tell the audience of any other innovations that the Trump administration is planning to unveil before the election?

CTHULHU – Certainly photog.  After paring down the bureaucracy by 80 or 90%, I intend to make it my priority to reform the tech industries.  To that end I will be spending several weeks visiting the headquarters of Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and various other social media companies.  I think I should meet face to face with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and their peers.  I have a few “suggestions” that I want to bat around with them.  I have this theory that if I show up looking in the 50th story window of their C-Suite offices that good things are bound to happen.  Now granted, I’m fairly sure that these fellows will end up lodged in my alimentary canal.  But we all need a dream.  And my dream is that one day these people will take a hint and do what I want them to do and avoid being eaten.  Sure, it won’t happen tomorrow or even ten years from tomorrow but eventually if I eat enough of these people Darwinian selection will lead to a better class of tech giants.  And that is my dream.

photog – Well, all I can say is may your dream come true.

CTHULHU – Sure, sure.  But hopefully not anytime soon.  With the skyrocketing price of meat in Biden’s America I have to eat as many dead-enders as I possibly can.  A Great Old One’s gotta eat.

Anyway, photog, I’ve got to cut this short.  I’m due in Brooklyn for a rally by the Pro-Hamas coalition of ethical hipsters.  I figure between the craft beers and the hummus dip I can eat a swath through them and really clean up most of Park Slope.  I hate hipsters.  I love eating them but I detest their annoying illogic.

photog – Well thanks Cthulhu for your time.  And come back any time.

The image of the Great Old One folded his front claws together in a sign of humble farewell and the screen went dark.

photog – I guess that’s all the time we have left.  I’d like to thank our sponsor Soylent Green for their patronage and add my personal tribute to their delicious line of energy products.  Remember, “When you want to feel keen, remember to eat green!”  Good night, everybody.

Anarcho-Tyranny in the Spotlight

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As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, I may not agree with all of the conclusions that the dissident right draw but without a doubt many of the observations and inferences they make about the world around us are completely correct.  For instance:

Sam Francis (April 29, 1947 – February 15, 2005) was a paleoconservative whose views would put him solidly amongst the dissident right today.  He coined the term anarcho-tyranny which refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens’ lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.  Commentators have invoked the term in reference to situations when governments focus on weapon confiscation instead of stopping looters.

This concept has been discussed very often on the ZMan’s site and it seems transparently clear that the current federal government and many state and local governments use this policy to punish some of their constituencies and reward others.  Essentially it sets up two separate systems of law.

In the recent past there are many examples of this concept in operation.  And in fact, it is the hallmark of the post George Floyd policing and prosecution strategies in most American cities.  Basically, blacks can commit an assortment of violent and non-violent offenses with impunity.  While if white people attempt to resist these crimes, they will be prosecuted with extreme severity.  The most well-known case was Kyle Rittenhouse who defended himself from Antifa attackers in Kenosha WI.  He was charged with murder but miraculously was exonerated in court.

I’ll give a few other examples.

I guess the general case would be to compare the government’s treatment of two groups.  The groups that were given preferential treatment would be the BLM and Antifa rioters during the 2020 riots.  These people were allowed to riot, loot and commit arson and even murder without the police or FBI using their considerable powers and capabilities to either stop it or arrest the perpetrators.  For weeks and across most of the large cities in the United States a reign of terror was permitted and in some cases like Minneapolis encouraged by government officials.

The contrasting group would be the January Sixth protestors.  For what amounts to peaceful trespass these United States citizens have been denied due process, imprisoned in some cases for years without trial and tried in kangaroo courts with sentences sometimes measured in decades of prison time.

Now if we were to look at specific cases, I think the case of subway good Samaritan Daniel Penny and the homeless lunatic he subdued is a perfect example.  Penny was on a subway car when a deranged homeless man named Jordan Neely began threatening random women passengers because they wouldn’t give him the money he demanded.  He went so far to make death threats.  Penny restrained Neely in a chokehold and unfortunately Neely died from this action.  Penny is a marine veteran and white, Neely was black and a homeless mental patient who had been arrested 42 times and punched a 62-year-old woman in the eye, and broke her eye socket.

So here we have anarcho-tyranny incarnate.  Jordan Neely was a creation of a system that would not arrest a black man who had broken the law over forty times.  They just released him to continue creating fear and hurting innocent people.  And when a white man protects the public from this menace he is charged with murder when what he was doing was defending himself and the weaker individuals being harassed by Neely.  He tried to do the job the prosecutors refused to do.

And so, this individual case showcases the intended effect of this anarcho-tyranny.  The law will defend those it favors who break the law and at the same time will force those it dislikes to suffer the crimes being allowed without even the chance for self-defense.  They just have to suffer and take it.  Or be sent to prison where even more of their humanity will be stripped away.

The dissident right gets a lot of things right.