This weird and stupid column by some old broad in the Washington Post is getting lots of traffic. I have never heard of the writer, but I’ll assume she is famous for something.

As deranged manifestos go, the final YouTube video made by suspected Isla Vista, Calif., mass murderer Elliot Rodger was remarkably well-made. Filmed by Rodger in his black BMW, with palm trees in the background and his face bathed in magic-hour key light, the six-minute diatribe — during which he vows revenge on all the women who rejected him and men who were enjoying fun and sex while he was “rotting in loneliness” — might easily have been mistaken for a scene from one of the movies Rodger’s father, Peter Rodger, worked on as a director and cinematographer.

Indeed, as important as it is to understand Rodger’s actions within the context of the mental illness he clearly suffered, it’s just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in. With his florid rhetoric of self-pity, aggression and awkwardly forced “evil laugh,” Rodger resembled a noxious cross between Christian Bale’s slick sociopath in “American Psycho,” the thwarted womanizer in James Toback’s “The Pick-Up Artist” and every Bond villain in the canon.

David Berkowitz thought his dog was telling him to kill people. The dog did not make him crazy or make him kill people. Berkowitz was crazy and crazy people think the family dog is telling them to kill. Some percentage of crazy people act on these delusions. It’s sad and we all hope that one day science can address these biological problems so that spree killing can be eliminated from life. Until then, crazy is a feature of human existence.

That’s where the stupid comes in. Stupid people like Ann Hornaday will still be out there looking to “find meaning” in the randomness of biology. Lacking the IQ to add anything to the stock of human understanding, she will make up nonsense about movies causing beta males to kill. I’m not sure which I would like solved first. Is it better to fix the crazy people or do something about the stupid people, who pollute the air with dumb ideas?

Speaking of beta males, Lion of the Blosphere has nine posts on the Elliot Rodgers story. The guy rarely posts anymore and he has nine posts on this one topic in two days. They are long posts as well. He appears to have read the killer’s manifesto and is deep in the weeds analyzing the mind of this one beta male. I’ve not read all of the posts, but it is rather clear the poor guy feels a kinship with the beta male killer.

The blogger formerly known as Half Sigma is an odd person. This old post about his many aliases maybe explains his fascination with beta male life and this story. The fact that he has such a large following says something too. What exactly, I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll post at length on the topic some other time, after I’ve had time to think about it. I just find the whole thing creepy and strange, but perhaps I’m just showing my age. In my day….

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[subscribe2]I used to spend time in Miami. It is a great town and I may relocate there in a few years. As you get older, cold weather becomes less tolerable. That’s why I have a soft spot for the place, even though it is barely America. Then again, American is barely America anymore so I guess it really does not matter.

Anyway, this story caught my attention. As you read the story or watch the video, what’s on your mind? What is the question you have as the story unfolds? What is not answered until you read the comments section?

I bet the answer to all of those questions is the same.

Imagine if it was a gang of Hell’s Angels rioting at the beach. I bet we would have full descriptions of everyone involved along with scary pictures of the bad guys. If a bunch of skinheads, assuming there’s enough of them around anymore to create a ruckus, were fighting on the streets their heritage  and ideology would be front and center, probably in the headline. That’s not the case here so we are left to wonder who they were and what they looked like.

Were they Chinese octogenarians?

A bunch of Jewish seniors angry over the new tipping rules at the IHOP?

Of course, everyone knows what’s going on here. That’s the way it is these days. Large parts of reality are simply unmentionable. We live in unreality-ville. That’s where we know things by their absence, in the same way astrophysicists identify a blackhole. That which can never been seen or pointed out is known by the warping of objects around it. It is there, but not there, because no on dare mention it.

What makes it laughable is the comments on every one of these stories. It has become a game amongst the proletariat to come up with the pithiest way to fill in the missing parts. In fact, the best part of crime stories these days is the peanut gallery. What makes it even zanier is the PC fanatics who run these sites don’t bother to police the comments section. Maybe they have simply thrown in the towel or perhaps it is just another weird angle to the unreality.

At some point in the future alien anthropologists will be digging through the rubble of our time, wondering how everyone went insane all at once.

A long time ago I had a boss say to me, “You don’t remove a fly from a friend’s face withe a hatchet.” He was referring to my habit of hitting back hard at even the slightest criticism. The point my boss was making was valid. There’s a time and place for applying the hatchet. On forums I frequent, I apply it to obvious trolls and nuisances that often turn up on non-Cult sites. They think they are cheeky for speaking truth to non-hive members. Telling them to drink poison or calling them child molesters is a good way to handle it.

That came to mind on NRO the other day. In this post from the house homosexual, Jason Lee Steorts, the comments veered into Derbyshire territory. Some said they did not like Derb, despite agreeing with most of what he said. That struck me as odd, but upon further inquiry it was matters of religion that caused the rift. Derb was often ham-handed in discussing religion so I can see why the religious would be offended. Even though I’m not religious, I too thought it was small of him to pick fights with the religious over evolution. Still, I enjoy Derb’s work so I can overlook it.

I was thinking about that while reading this from Theodore Dalrymple. Over the years I’ve enjoyed his work, for the most part. His essays about his prison work were always fascinating. He’s one of those Brits who seems to have the right distance between total detachment and emotional engagement. Often, British writers come of a bit sterile trying to be too objective. Others are too Benn Hill, silly for the sake of being silly. Like Derb, Dalrymple usually strikes the right tone for my tastes.

That said, there are times when you see the frayed edges of someone’s character. Derb’s taunting of the religious is one such example. I suspect he does it because he harbors his own doubts. I would not more debate the existence of leprechauns than debate creationism. Your belief in either has no impact on me. In the case of the Dalrymple column, I get the image of a prickly old dickhead who has decided he cannot enjoy life and remain a moral man. I’ve known a few of those in my life. They obsess over some popular trifle to the point of distraction.

A old fellow student of mine, now a distinguished professor, recently gave an interview in a learned journal and was asked what gave him the greatest pleasure in life. He replied that it was when the team he supported scored a goal.

I tried to work out whether this was worse true than untrue. If true it implied a rather sad existence, in which the kicking of a ball into the net of an opponent’s goal by a highly paid mercenary, who would immediately play for the opposing side if offered a few paltry millions more a year or a week to do so, and who had absolutely no connection with the area of the team for which he played, not geographical, cultural, personal, familial, or even national, was the highest imaginable point. But if untrue, why the lie, why did he pretend that a goal scored by “his” team was so important to him?

It is one thing to not follow sports. I don’t follow soccer, for example. They could hold the World Cup in my front yard and I would go out of town to void the crush. But, people enjoy it and there is no obvious harm in it. Life is for living. If you get pleasure from watching little men in shorts chase a ball around a field, good for you.

I know people who collect butterflies, guitars, antique golf clubs and little bottles of chili sauce. I have no interest in any of that, but the people who do it are nice enough and they are causing me no harm so I wish them the best. That seems like a normal response, the most common response.

This is one of those examples of someone’s slip showing. He strikes the pose of the intellectual, but at some level he sees himself as self-taught member of the lower class and it bugs him, maybe even haunts him. So much so he he is driven a bit mad by it.

It’s one of those things that causes you to rethink your evaluation of someone. It’s like learning a person you admire hates animals or is sexually attracted to obese women. You overlook it, but it forever colors your view of the person. It’s why sharing intimate details of ones life is always a bad idea, even among close friends. There’s no obvious benefit and plenty of downside. Still, Dalrymple is a fun writer to read and this is a small matter, but….

Steve Sailer has a snarky post up about the European elections. Everyone on the reactionary right is celebrating the results. It is hard not to feel some joy over it. On the one hand, it is clearly a rejection of the open borders, replace the people strategy of the elites. In France, a vote for FN is a vote against immigration. No Frenchman voted for FN thinking they were anything other than hostile to immigration.

There’s a strong anti-elite element too. Farage and UKIP are old school populists as much as they are anti-immigrant. The Tories have wandered off into some weird ideological place in search of a constituency. Their old voters have no other place to go so they are voting for Farage. UKIP is probably just the old Tory party bursting forth from the dying husk of the new Tory party.

It is easy to think the tide may be turning, but I don’t read it that way. UKIP is the real deal. They are building a party from the ground up and will have the boots on the ground to make noise in subsequent elections.Whether or not the British people will throw in with them in 2015 is open for debate. Given the state of the Empire, betting on the British people looks like a loser to me.

The Continent is a similar story. These elections were low-turnout symbolic actions by the most highly motivated part of the anti-elite electorate. There’s little evidence FN can build on to this and become a player in French politics. Syriza is the real deal in Greece, but let’s not kid ourselves about the importance of Greece. In Germany, the only country that matters in Europe right now, anti-EU forces have not made much noise at all.

In short, one election does not mean much.

There’s something else. The march of human history is toward larger and larger organizational units. For about 35,000 years, modern humans were in groups no larger than about 150. That was the practical limit for a hunter-gatherer people. Once the group got too big, it split up and one half went one way and the other went its own way. We can’t know for sure, of course, but the current science suggests trust beyond kin was not well developed at this stage. Once you get beyond 150 people, you start having unrelated males thrown in together, which is going to be trouble for obvious reasons.

Once humans began to settle, the organizational groups got bigger. Farming naturally brings trading and property ownership. That requires more complex relationships. It also requires trust between unrelated males. The traits and customs allowing for unrelated males to trust one another and adjudicate breeches in trust probably developed in tandem as human settlements grew larger.

Hierarchical relationships also had to develop as someone had to be in charge to enforce the rules. If you look at early British history, for example, ruling families were the dominant hierarchical relationship. The descendants of Ida ruled parts of Britain for generations.

Anyone familiar with their history knows where I’m going. Settlements became towns and towns became cities. Over time city-states developed and they were replaced by combinations of cities that eventually became principalities. Most of the European history we learn in school is the battle over the consolidation of lands into nations. From the 100 Years War through World War Two, the people of Europe battled to figure out the boundaries and relationship of the nations of the continent.

Post-War Europe has been an extended debate over how to build a Europe-wide organizational unit. Eliminating trade barriers eliminates a key role of national government. The free flow of people eliminates a reason for national borders. Combining currencies further erodes the rationale for national government.

It is not just Europe. Relationships between countries over trade and property are now managed through supranational organizations. When the US has a dispute with China over trade, it goes to some international body for adjudication. Congress has no say and the people are not consulted. Treaty agreements are being crafted to get around pesky legal problems like the US Constitution. The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty is an attempt to junk the Second Amendment through international agreement.

Then we have the interlocking central banks that control the world’s financial system. The high level of coordination between the main banks and the IMF very well may be the main peace keeping organization now. Look at how they have been able to keep Ukraine from turning hot. Russia is so tied into the financial system, they cannot afford to get in a fight with the West.

If you’re wondering where the “right side of history” lies, history seems to be saying it is bigger and bigger government. The argument against all of this is language, culture and genetics. That’s a good argument and we may have reached a natural limit of human organization. But that’s not the way to bet. A paleolithic Steve Sailer probably thought human settlement or agriculture was a loser, too. The right side of history has always been bigger and bigger organizational units. The rise of nationalist parties in Europe could very well be a last gasp effort to resist the inevitable.

Modern times is a lot about discovering what we used to know. It seems like every day there is a study overturning conventional wisdom by proving what we always knew to be true was, in fact, true all along.

According to a new study, pedophiles’ brains are “abnormally tuned” to find young children attractive.

Lead Researcher Jorge Ponseti from the University of Kiel in Germany says now it may be possible to diagnose pedophiles before they are able to offend.

The researchers found that pedophiles have the same neurological reaction to images of those they find attractive as those of people with ordinary sexual predilections. A pedophile’s relevant cerebral areas become engaged when they see children. When an adult finds someone attractive, their occipital areas become engaged, but this is inverted for pedophiles.

The researchers believe this is proof that there is a neural pattern behind a pedophile’s behavior.

Since the invention of writing, people have been jotting down this observation. Pedophiles are sexually attracted to children. Homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex. Heterosexuals are attracted to members of the opposite sex. We have known this is nature since forever and then we forgot it somewhere in the middle of the last century. Instead, pedophiles were making poor choices or were the victims of their environment.

“The human brain contains networks that are tuned to face processing, and these networks appear to activate different processing streams of the reproductive domain selectively: nurturing processing in the case of child faces and sexual processing in the case of sexually preferred adult faces,” they noted in the study. “This implies that the brain extracts age-related face cues of the preferred sex that inform appropriate response selection in the reproductive domains: nurturing in the case of child faces and mating in the case of adult faces.”

The researchers analyzed data obtained from MRI scans of 56 male participants. That group included 13 homosexual pedophiles and 11 heterosexual pedophiles. The men were then exposed to high arousing images of men, women, boys, and girls. The participants were then asked to rank each photo in level of attractiveness. This led the researchers to conclude that the brain networks of pedophiles are activated by sexual immaturity.

“The critical new finding is that face processing is also tuned to face cues revealing the developmental stage that is sexually preferred,” the study stated.

Get back to me when you discover something we don’t know.

If I were advising a politician these days, one of the first things I would do is lecture him and his staff about the realities of the American press corp. In my lifetime, the most bizarre and disturbing aspect of politics has been the press. They operate like a weird religious order that only cares about the hunt for heretics, even though heresy is based on an ever shifting collection of fads. The press will savagely attack someone today for saying what they held up as eternal truth last week. The liberal media are the Jesuits of the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

If you are on the outside, they will never give you a fair hearing. When some poor slob fell afoul of the Inquisition, the inquisitor was not interested in being fair. Long before he became interested in the sinner, he made up his mind. That’s how things work with the fanatics in the press corp. They are always scanning the horizon for heretics they can attack. If you are a member of the wrong party or hold the wrong ideas, they will savage you. There’s no amount of facts and evidence you can muster to change their minds.

A good example of the berserk fanaticism of the media is in this article about the never ending clown show that is the Obama presidency.

The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

OK, we have a banal report on another unforced error by the White House.

The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

There we have it. Nothing in that graph is true, but the fanatic who wrote the piece believes it to be true. The editors probably believe it to be true. They don’t care. More important, they found a way to attack an enemy of the faith. In this weird religious order we call the mainstream press, the currency is the number of attacks one launches on the heretics. That’s all that matters.

If you are a political party or politicians, you have to accept this reality. These people are crazy. They are not nice people who are mistaken. They are not persuadable. They are nuts and they are hoping for the chance to destroy you.

The reason the GOP is a train wreck is they continue to think they can get along with these fanatics. You cannot win if you play by the rules set by these nuts. That’s the first lesson from the Reagan years. He changed the rules on the press corp and was able to discredit them. They hated him for it, but he was not looking to be buddies with fruitcakes like Sam Donaldson.

That’s a the lesson we see in the recent European elections. The successful insurgents have kept the media at a distance. UKIP knows the British press is hostile and plans accordingly. FN has ignored the press entirely. On the other hand, Geert Wilders has been trying hard to look swell, playing by the rules of the mainstream press. The result was a weak showing in the elections.

In America, a guy like Rick Perry, for example, would be wise to pick some fights with the hard thumping loons like NBC. Exclude them by not issuing them credentials to his events or responding to their requests. When they complain, make clear that they are going to be treated as any other advocacy group. When it comes to interviews, avoid the lefty press entirely. Go on talk radio and give time to the alternative press that is friendly to his issues.

There is an example to follow. Black NBA players in the 1990’s would only talk to black reporters like Mike Wilbon and Ahmad Rashad. Michael Jordon was quite clear about it. He wanted to help the black reporters. The result is black sports writers came to dominate NBA coverage. Conservatives, libertarians and the GOP needs to follow a similar plan. Treat lefty as the enemy and seek out friendly media to support.

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“It’s my morning ritual,” says the collector. “I get a cup of coffee and open up eBay and Etsy. I’ve bought two or three penises before most people’s alarm clocks have gone off.”

This story in The Week, which I think is what’s left of Newsweek, is a writers dream Anytime you get to write the word “penis” in a non-medical way you’re going to have a good time writing the story. I’m sure Kyria’s colleagues were green with penis envy.

The collector, who wishes not to reveal his name, lives in an $850-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side — the same place he’s resided since 1977. The spacious, railroad-style abode has seen its fair share of collections come and go over the past 24 years. First, he collected various versions of the five of spades, from playing card decks. Then, it was misters — anything to do with the word “mister,” be it Coffee, Clean or T. There was also the series of devils and a collection of Nancy comic strip paraphernalia — that androgynous, hollow-eyed, Brillo-haired girl made famous by Ernie Bushmiller. But in the end, one collection stood high above the rest: penises.

What jumps out to me is the fact this guy is paying $850 a month for an apartment in Manhattan. The average rental is $3800 a month right now and a reason for it is rent control.

There are well over a thousand pieces of penis-related art in his home, and yes, the collection is growing on a daily basis.

Upon entering the apartment, the first penis you will most likely notice is a winged phallus hanging from the entrance to the living room. After that, your eyes may settle upon the upward curve of a bronze coat hanger, the drawing of a little boy peeing into Humpty Dumpty’s mouth, or the statue of David above a toilet. The collector’s apartment is a cacophony of cocks. A deluge of dicks. A plethora of penii.

Standing 6’2″ with snow-white hair, the collector, age 58, admits that even he has to be careful not to hit his head on some of the low-hanging fruit when moving about his apartment.

“You should see the faces on the delivery guys when they come up. I open the door to get my food, and they get a glimpse inside. Dicks everywhere! You can see their eyes widen, and then they always take this tiny step backwards. I live for the day when a hapless religious proselytizer makes the mistake of knocking on my door.”

The American Empire is run from apartments in Manhattan and townhouses in Georgetown. Both places are nothing like America in even small ways.

Alas, the rest of us will most likely not have a chance to see the apartment. The collector chose to remain anonymous for this article not because he is embarrassed of the sexual content of his collection (“I have no shame, and I love the shock effect,” he says), but because he would like to avoid having random people tracking him down for a viewing.

“I like that it’s a private collection. It’s just for the people I choose,” he says. “I can’t help it. I’m an elitist.”

That sounds like what one would expect from an urban intellectual living in Manhattan. Then we get this.

Back in 1977, the collector was a sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll party animal who hung out at music and dance club icons like Danceteria, The Mudd Club, and CBGBs. These days, he’s more of a homebody with 25 years of sobriety and an extensive collection of independent films.

Although he makes a good living, most of his money goes to his collection. As such, he sometimes has trouble making ends meet. He supplements his day job as a concierge in the Garment Center, which he’s held for more than two decades, by working “mad hours of overtime” running a freight elevator.

This is why the power centers of the Empire are nothing like America. In the hinterlands, a concierge lives in a small apartment on the seedy side of town, not in a tony apartment building with members of the elite. He’s not building a collection of dicks and getting written up by some hipster snob either.

The lands of our rulers are nothing like where the rest of us live.

My friends and I joke that race and ethnicity will give way to mega-corp loyalty. People will self-identify as Google or Apple or Amazon. It is becoming difficult to not have some business with these companies. If you are a reader, Amazon is the default bookstore. I have a Prime account so I buy all sorts of other junk through them as well as books. Google has your email and personal information, which they share with the state. Apple is a weird cult of people who fashion themselves tech-savvy so they insist on products requiring zero technical skill.

Anyway, lost in it all is Amazon is not a healthy business. By the standards of finance, the stock is over priced by a factor of 24. That’s right. They have a P/E of 487 as of right now. For a bio-tech startup, that’s OK, but for a mature business it is staggeringly high. That stock price would have to fall to $13 for the stock to be prized at a typical P/E.

From the story:

Amazon’s power over the publishing and bookselling industries is unrivaled in the modern era. Now it has started wielding its might in a more brazen way than ever before.

Seeking ever-higher payments from publishers to bolster its anemic bottom line, Amazon is holding books and authors hostage on two continents by delaying shipments and raising prices. The literary community is fearful and outraged — and practically begging for government intervention.

This is the sort of thing a business does when they have run out of other options. They have squeezed every cent from their supply chain. They have automated everything that can be automated. They have baffled the markets with their drone bullshit, but no one is buying that much longer. They either start posting better results or there will be a rush for the exists.

“How is this not extortion? You know, the thing that is illegal when the Mafia does it,” asked Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, echoing remarks being made across social media.

Amazon is, as usual, staying mum. “We talk when we have something to say,” Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive, said at the company’s annual meeting this week.

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

One of the under discussed facts about the “new” economy is these tech giants are mostly skimming operations and rentiers. A book from Amazon is the same as a book from Fred’s book shop. You’re not saving money or getting anything extra from Amazon. They make their money from convenience and that has a small premium. Much of their success depends on using networks developed by other firms, for which Amazon pays nothing.

That’s what’s coming next for Amazon and NetFlix. The ISP’s will begin throttling their services unless they pay for their usage. Those costs will not be passed to the customers of these services instead of financed by everyone else. Similarly, Facebook would go out of business in a week if they had to pay the ISP’s for their bandwidth. Socialism works until it runs out of new people to tax.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing.

Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict.

“We are determined to protect the value of our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president. “We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

The Authors Guild accused the retailer of acting illegally.

“Amazon clearly has substantial market power and is abusing that market power to maintain and increase its dominance, which likely violates Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act,” said Jan Constantine, the Guild’s general counsel.

I’m an Amazon user and I hope they can survive, but not if it means crushing independent publishing. That’s bad for humanity. The destruction of independent music producers and stations killed pop music. It will be worse for publishing since it takes greater intellectual prowess.

When you live in a real country, the government is a reflection of the people. It is an extension of the people. Discussions about democracy and representative government are all fine and dandy, but they are worthless unless the government is in fact the spear and shield of the people. On the one hand it must attack those who wish to harm the people and defend against those who attack the people. Otherwise, it is not a government. It is just a way to keep people occupied with busy work.

Consider Finland. In 1939, the Soviet Union attempted to invade Finland. The Finnish government organized a defense, despite being grossly outnumbered. The great hero of the Finnish people, Simo Häyhä, serving under the 6th Company of JR 34 on the Kollaa River.

The Finns faced both the 9th and 14th Soviet Armies, and at one point were fighting against as many as 12 divisions— about 160,000 soldiers. Also at one point in the same area, there were only 32 Finns fighting against over 4,000 Soviets. Imagine that.

The Finns were ferocious and brilliant fighters. The Soviets were not well organized and the soldiers spoke many different languages. That’s what you get when you are not a real country. The Finns, being outnumbered, employed a strategy they called “Motti.” This was a form of guerilla warfare, taking advantage of the weather and terrain. Simo Häyhä killed over 500 men in the winter campaign, the Soviets called him the “white death” for his prowess at killing Soviets in the snow.

Now, since this is Memorial Day weekend, consider Belleau Wood. This is a part of France made famous by the United States Marine Corp. On June 1, 1918 the Germans mounted an offensive against French and American lines in France. The French, of course, fled in terror. At this point France had ceased to be a real country. The Americans refused to flee. When ordered to retreat, Marine Captain Lloyd W. Williams of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines uttered the now-famous retort “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”

Over the next two days, despite being outnumbered, the Marines held their ground, repelling the German advance. Once it was safe, the French returned to reinforce the line against the Germans and otherwise annoy the Americans.

The next month proved to be one of the most ferocious battles fought by American soldiers since Appomattox. The Marines eventually pushed the Germans out of the forest, earning the nickname “Devil Dogs” for their ferocity and courage. The French, once they came out of hiding, renamed the wood “Bois de la Brigade de Marine” in honor of their defenders.

Real countries not only defend their borders, they have the will and energy to take the fight to the other guy. The Finns were outnumbered and out-armed. They fought heroically in defense of their lands. Those Marines at Belleau Wood, swelling with the pride that comes from being citizens of a great country, made the ground shake. Their French counterparts could barely be moved to defend their own lands.

Now, let’s look at something from today’s news.

Two frightening incidents of vandalism in El Paso near the Mexican border in Texas have been interpreted as warnings from drug cartels.

In both instances, a mannequin wearing a suit and tie was tied to a billboard with a noose and messages were scrawled over the placards.

Local station KHOU reports that one of the signs reads ‘Plata o Plombo’ which translates to ‘silver or lead’, a threat used commonly against police officers effectively warning that if they do not accept the cartel’s bribes then they will be shot.

‘This symbol has historically been used by Mexican drug cartels to threaten or intimidate Mexican citizens, business owners and government officials; however, we have never experienced this in El Paso,’ local police said in a press release about the vandalism.

Our ruling class has been working overtime to keep these problems from the people. It is an obvious lie. Mexico has been exporting their problems to America for decades. Those problems include drug cartels.

The fear now for many is that the ‘warnings’ shows that the drug cartels- which have not been identified by name- are willing to bring the violence from Mexican border towns into Texas.

‘Maybe the problems in Juarez are coming over here,’ El Paso resident Javier Padilla told KHOU.

Really? What was the clue? Was it the fact that much of your town suddenly looks like Tijuana? Was it the army of little brown people shuffling through your streets on their way to the rest of the country?

Mr Padilla and his wife Maria Ramos know the terror of drug cartels on a personal level after two relatives were murdered in the area of Juarez in 2009.

The second instance of vandalism had a more obtuse warning, but the theme ran through since the message was written on an existing Drug Enforcement Agency billboard.

The message was different this time, as the paint read: ‘Dying for drugs’ was written over a wanted poster calling for the capture of drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero.

This second mannequin was dressed in jeans rather than the suit and tie from the other instance.

The mannequins were a particularly jarring image for many familiar with the drug war, as some of the most violent drug lords south of the border regularly hang offenders off highway overpasses.

While a warning from drug lords seems like one of the most likely prospects, KHOU reports that prosecutors have another theory that the vandalism also could have been caused by activist groups working against the war on drugs.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Let’s not consider the obvious. Instead, let’s launch a manhunt for elves and leprechauns.

This is why America is no longer a real country. In the 1950’s, the government rounded up 170,000 illegals in one summer and shipped them back to their home country. They had nothing like the technology we have today. The government had to drive around and pick people up. Today, we can’t even throw one guy out after he went on TV and proclaimed he is here illegally.

At least the Frogs cling to their language and cheese. We have complete given up on ourselves as a nation and people.

Driving to the office today, I spied a bumper sticker that read Elizabeth Warren Wing. It looked like the one below, but with some military insignia. The Left likes military imagery.

Expect this one to show up a lot amongst the the bulldyke wing:

Photo credit: Tim Pierce

I love how the Helen-Reddy-I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar generation of feminists put so much effort into their makeup. This pic is doctored to iron out all the wrinkles and old lady blemishes from her face. The Aryan mug screaming and holding up a clenched fists is a nice call back to the Left’s glory days.

Anyway, a little googling gets me this piece from the Daily Lunatic.

Who would have thought that the confluence of Wall Street, Occupy and a Harvard Law School professor would give rise to a new wing of the Democratic Party?

Starting as a populist long-shot espousing economic fairness in the face of an economy devastated by Wall Street loan securitization and derivatives, Elizabeth Warren’s name has become the watchword of a new crop of political candidates pushing back against corporate control of our government.

Economic justice is back in vogue.

The Teaparty days of tearing down the government and starving domestic programs of tax revenues are being drowned out with renewed calls for reinstating previously higher taxes on corporations and millionaires.

Tax fairness was the subject of a widely publicized Progressive Change Campaign media phone call yesterday.  Participating were Progressive Caucus leader, Rep. Raul Grijalva and aspiring “Elizabeth Warren Wing” newcomers running for Congress

Of course, the idiots over in the GOP and Conservative Inc don’t see it coming. They’re too busy figuring out how to run off harmless kooks like Rand Paul so Jeb Bush can have an easy time of it in the primaries.

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