Monthly Archives: December 2016

2017 Predictions

Posted on by

It’s here! It’s finally here! That’s right, here is my annual prediction post. Last year’s post can be found here. Reading it over, I’m surprised to see I got a lot of them right or at least close enough to pretend I was right.  Looking back on it, I was ahead of the curve on what was going on with Trump in the election. I also got the Fed strategy right, but the timing a bit off. I was hilariously right about the North Koreans and the Muslim diaspora into Europe. In both cases, those outcomes were so obvious there should be a penalty for not getting them right.

On the down side, the Red Sox did not win the World Series and the Patriots did not win the Super Bowl. Even worse, the Yankees did not go 0-and-162. Looking back, the one area where my predictions are never right is in the area of sports. That’s not a surprise as I actually care about sports. The rest of the stuff is just what I do between watching my teams play sportsball. But, The Olde Towne Team had a good year, a great Hot Stove Season and the great Tom Brady is leading America’s Team to another title this year!

So, what are the goat entrails telling me this year?

Part of the return to normalcy in America will be Washington reacquainting itself with economic matters. Trump knows he needs something big to goose the economy and give his presidency a boost. The way forward on that is to start with a big sweeping tax reform package. Given the make-up of the House, expect a package that simplifies business taxes, cuts the corporate rate and offers a big bag of goodies for companies that make stuff and employ people. That means big deductions for capital expenditures like machine tools and heavy equipment.

The signs also point to an effort at peeling back a thick slice of the regulatory state. Trump is a guy who remembers the Reagan years and he knows the impact of deregulation had on the economy. He’s also a guy who has spent his life dealing with government functionaries enforcing bureaucratic regulations. Republicans have been plotting a big rollback for over a decade and now they have their shot. ObamaCare is an obvious target, but look for this to be part of a larger rollback of regulations in an effort to boost the economy…

This is the year we see the floor fall out of the climate change rackets. Most Americans think global warming is nonsense and one of those Americans is Trump. There will be a concerted effort to depoliticize the climate science business by running off some of the fanatics and opening the field back up to sensible skeptics. The main driver will be turning off the money spigot to the fanatics and shifting funds to the honest science.  When the money goes away, the grifters go away…

The problems in the Chinese political economy will become more obvious to western policy makers as the boom times come to an end. There’s not much left the US can outsource to China, even if there was desire to do it. The Chinese know this and they have been feverishly trying to adjust by boosting domestic consumption. The trouble is it will require a vast restructuring of the Chinese society. The ChiComs are not intimated by such a task, but that does not make it less daunting.

China has a lot of smart people, but they have never figured out how to protect themselves from tyrants. That’s the limit on economic growth. When the government can arbitrarily take your property, there is no incentive to invest, unless you have political power. That breeds corruption and it breeds a bandit mentality. That’s the challenge for the ChiComs and what will stymie their efforts to move from a mercantile economy to a market one. This is the year when the problems start to become obvious…

Syria, Turkey, Iraq and maybe even Jordan become less stable over the next year as the West cannot agree on a coherent policy for the region. One reason for the chaos is no player has the resources to impose its will on the rest. The Russians have enough to keep Assad in power, but not enough to wipe out the Saudi and GCC sponsored rebels. The Saudis can keep the kettle boiling, but they cannot do much more without the US. Israel is happy to see her enemies fighting with one another so they will not be pushing for a resolution…

The alt-right will fall prey to infighting and squabbling and slowly burn itself out over the next year. The fighting between Cernovich, Treadstone and Spencer has all the familiar features. On the one side will be the guys who dream of riding their fame as rebels to positions within the establishment. On the other will be those who see legitimization as treason. One side goes one way, the other side goes the opposite and the “movement” splinters and dissolves. This is a common dynamic in radical politics and it will happen with the New Right…

Gene editing will become a very serious topic of conversation among the chattering classes. Ten years ago, no one in science really thought it was going to be cheap and easy to edit the human genome anytime soon. All of a sudden, CRISPR/Cas9 promises to make genetic engineering a reality. Researchers have already done things like edit bone marrow cells in mice to treat sickle-cell anemia. The Chinese have used this technology to edit the genome of human embryos.

We’re still a long way from creating designer humans, but the path is suddenly open to solving a whole host of diseases. The Chinese will rush ahead with human testing, but the West will most likely start on more mundane things like creating disease resistant plants and treatments for insect borne viruses. Tinkering with mosquitoes so they no longer can carry the Zika virus has fewer moral obstacles than tinkering with humans. Even so, the brave new world begins this year…

The coming Trump immigration push will reveal that we no longer have two parties, but one party with two sides, one on each end of the immigration issue. Paul Ryan will lead the open borders wing in opposition to Trump and the nationalist wing. This will be seen as the first steps in the great realignment of the parties as a big chunk of people currently in the GOP camp begin to make their way over to the Democrat side. American politics will begin to resemble Israeli politics, where one issue divides the parties…

That’s it for this year. It has been a banner year for the blog, adding tens of thousands of new readers and many new commenters. I appreciate everyone taking the time out of their day to read and respond.

Happy New Year to one and all.

Girrrrl Power!

Posted on by

One of my friends mentioned the other day that he had seen the movie Rogue One, the latest Star Wars offering. He said he liked it, which I thought surprising. From the commercials, I was under the impression that it was another Girrrrl Power! movie telling us that girls can do anything they set their pretty little heads to, even if the evil white men try to stop them. Put another way, it looks like another movie that has a tiny little female in a role that was traditionally played by a tough guy leading man.

He said it had a lot of that nonsense, but the shoot ’em up stuff and special effects were good enough to let you ignore the preachy garbage. My friend is a movie goer so he has developed the ability to filter out the proselytizing so he can enjoy the entertainment portion of films. Maybe that is a skill you acquire after sitting through a certain quantity of movies or maybe it is a natural personality trait. I know I lack it, which is why I don’t watch many movies. If it is going to be preachy, I’ll just skip it.

There’s also the Star Wars element. For good or ill, the franchise has a become Star Trek for the fake nerd movement. Women who “fucking love science” seem to be big into Star Wars. I liked the movies as a kid, but I was always a Star Trek guy. I also tended toward real science fiction, the stuff you had to read. Even as a kid, Star Wars struck me as a bad western with good special effects set in space. It’s why I only got around to watching the “prequels” earlier this year when they were on free cable.

Star Wars is a good reminder that pop culture is aimed mostly at women and kids, so it is no country for old men. Peddling movies to young people is made easier by the fact they don’t know a lot. They simply have not been alive long enough to notice that this year’s blockbuster is the blockbuster from five years ago, just with different actors and explosions. They don’t know that Big Bang Theory is just Friends, with nerds instead of hot looking Manhattanites. This stuff is all new to them so they eagerly buy it up.

Women are also easy targets for pop culture because women are hard wired to notice what other women are doing. It’s why the fashion industry exists. Most men wear the same styles their whole life. Women change every year. That’s because of biology. Hollywood has figured this out so they put out films with female leads in the newest styles and fashions. Since the New Religion says all girls are really kick-ass ninja warriors, we get lots of films where 90-pound pixie ninjas with adorable haircuts.

The odious John Podhoretz claims that Hollywood figured out that action films would always attract male viewers so they decided to cast females in the lead to bring in the females. Podhoretz is an example of reversion to the mean, his father being an exceptionally smart man, but he may be correct here. This sounds like the sort of thing a corporate studio would do, thinking it is brilliant. Whether it works or not will never be tested because the committee said it was brilliant and the matter is closed. It strikes me as plausible, at least.

No matter the reason, the thing about modern movies is the habit of putting females in roles that should be played by men. Unlike the habit of casting a black guy in the smart guy role, this feminizing of the male lead never works as intended. There are smart black guys in the real world. There are no 90-pound females beating up full sized bad guys using nothing but ninja moves. That’s never happened. It’s never going to happen either. No one comes away thinking it will ever happen, other than the crazies in the cult.

The other day, I watched a movie called Sicario, which is about Mexican drug dealers and the US efforts to catch them. The movie is well done and a good two hours of entertainment. The one problem is they put a tiny little nymph in the lead role. The viewer is supposed to accept that this tiny little girl is not just a member of a tactical team, but recruited to be part of what amounts to an off-the-books Seal Team. Most of her screen time is her brooding and crying over the fact the boys don’t play by the rules.

Of course, the writers, directors and producers of our entertainments have to work within the rules the censors give them. We’re supposed to believe the censors were all sent packing, but they never went away. It’s just that they were replaced with ideological enforcers from the Cult. Instead of a prim faced Christian lady editing the scripts, it is a vinegar drinking lesbian from the Womyn’s Studies Department. The people making a living in Hollywood like their jobs so they play along as that is the path of least resistance.

The result is a paucity of male leads in movies these days. This probably has something to do with the collapse of the male audience for movies. Guys are not all that interested in Girrrlll Power!. Young males are spending their leisure time blowing stuff up and killing people in video games. It’s why the lunatics have been making war on gaming. They will not sleep until the last pale penis person is hunted down and forced to submit to the New Religion. Given the results thus far, it does appear that the effort has failed.

Maybe that means the Girrrrl Power! era is coming to a close. Movie makers need to make money so they may be forced to bring back the normal male leads. Maybe the next big thing in movies will be men who are not sobbing pussies, but old fashioned tough guys doing the hard work of being men. I hope so as I’m getting old and it will not be long before I’m spending my days in the movie theater with the other geezers, before we head to Denny’s for a 4:00 PM dinner.

The Face of Modern Antisemitism

Posted on by

In a speech delivered Wednesday, that was supposed to be the pièce de résistance for one of the dumbest men to take up space in the political class, John Forbes Kerry declared himself an anti-Semite. He was not that polite about either. If he had simply said, “I hate Jews” that would be better than what he actually said. Specifically he said, “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, but it cannot be both.” In other words, he hates the very concept of Judaism, not just a particular manifestation of it.

The implication, the only way to interpret it, is that he thinks Judaism is incompatible with liberal democracy. There’s never been a time when he has hinted at the same argument with regards to Islam. He has not even said this about Christianity. That would be laughably stupid, but Lurch is a laughably stupid man. No, he specifically singled out Judaism for this argument. Judaism is incompatible with democracy. Presumably, he would argue that Jews can either be Jewish or citizens of a democracy, but not both.

Sensible people have pointed out for years that Islam is incompatible with modern liberal democracy. The reason we say this is Muslims regularly say that Islam is incompatible with Western liberalism. Logically, Imams and Muslim scholars are good authorities on these issues so taking them at their word is a good idea. The fact that everywhere Muslims get to vote they go for theocracy confirms these claims. Muslims are not fond of democracy and they really hate modern liberal democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state and a liberal democracy. Christians and Muslims are free to do their thing, as long as they abide by the laws of Israel, which are written by the Israeli parliament. In theory, Israelis could vote to fling open their borders and let the Muslims pour into the country. They can vote for all sorts of things, because it is a democracy, but they choose to be a Jewish state that preserves itself as the homeland of world Jewry. As a sovereign people, that is their right and consistent with western liberal democracy.

John Kerry disagrees. He does not thinks Jews have a place in a liberal democracy, even one of their own. The modern Progressive sees national and ethnic identity as obstacles to the glorious future. It’s why they embrace open borders and multiculturalism. They truly believe that obliterating ethnic and national identity is the key to the lock. Jews are the most stubborn of ethnic groups because they combine race and religion into a single, immutable identity. That simply cannot work in the glorious future.

It was always just a matter of time before American progressives got around to Jew-hating. Once you go down the road of multiculturalism, you eventually end up trying to erase anything resembling cultural identity. Now that you-know-who is far enough in the past, no longer in the rear view mirror for most people, taking on the tree stump of ethnic identity was inevitable. For 2,000 years, Jews have kept their thing going in the West, despite every conceivable attempt to erase them. Now it is the Left’s shot at them.

The Abuse of Sexual Assault

Posted on by

The other day, I ran across this story in the sports pages. The sporting news often resembles the police blotter, so this is not a unique news item. I usually skip these stories, but something about it peaked peeked piqued my curiosity. The accused in this case is a college football player charged with “sexual assault” along with some other crimes. Like most people, I hear the word sexual assault and I think rape, but then I remember the mountain of rape hoaxes on the college campus and I’m immediately skeptical.

In this case, the player is charged with two counts of fourth degree sexual assault, crimes resulting from the cops trying to arrest him and underage drinking. Sandbagging is the standard procedure these days so even the smallest crime ends up in a litany of charges. Because cops and prosecutors are mostly incompetent, they use the sheer mass of the system to bludgeon those caught up in the system.  The idea is to bully the accused into taking a deal, which makes life easier for the cops and prosecutors.

Of course, the charge that will ruin the kid’s life is the sexual assault charge. Looking at the news story from when it happened, you get to see the absurdity of the charges. In Michigan, fourth degree sexual assault is basically aggressive touching, at least when it is between adults. It is always leveled at males, who get into some sort of beef with a female. Two fully clothed people on a city street are not engaging in anything sexual, but that does not matter. It is the go-to charge against young males in an altercation with a female.

Common law defined rape as unlawful intercourse by a man against a woman who is not his wife by force or threat and against her will. These days, rape is legally defined as unlawful intercourse against the will of the victim. In other words, the sex of the parties and the use of force are no longer relevant. Attempted rape, of course, is a failed attempt to commit rape. These are concepts that everyone understands, with deep roots in western legal tradition. They don’t require further explanation as the definitions are clear.

Assault is a bit different. Most people think of assault as physical contact where one person causes bodily harm to another. That’s not the legal definition of assault. In the law, assault is an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact. Put another way, assault is when one person does something to cause another to think they are under threat of harm. What most people think of as assault, the law defines as battery, which is why you hear the phrase “assault and battery” in crime stories.

The point here is the law has had, for a very long time, a definition for forcible sex, assault and battery. A reasonable person, particularly someone on a jury, could review the facts and testimony and render a judgement. That should have been enough to cover what happened in this Michigan case and all others like it. Maybe the accused was threatening the woman and she had a reasonable concern for her safety. That’s assault. It is patently absurd to attach sex to it, raising the specter of rape in the minds of the public and a potential jury.

But that is where we find ourselves in the modern age. We have expanded the definition of a sex crime to include anything that may give a woman the blues. The lunatics in charge encourage young women on the college campus to scream “fourth degree sexual assault” whenever they feel bad about a random hookup, which they are encouraged to do by the same lunatics. Inevitably, these cases end up dismissed, but you still have the waste of money and the ruination of reputations.

The fact is, there is no such thing as a sexual assault. The law often conjures terms, from commonly understood words, that have meanings well outside of the component words. It is almost always a hangover from the past. In the case of “sexual assault” it is a modern attempt to alter the relationship between the sexes. When was the last time you heard a woman charged with sexual assault or a man charged when the victim is another man? The answer is most likely never as it almost rarely happens.

It is yet another example of how the Left carves out authoritarian safe spaces, so it can run wild against its enemies. The war on men would not get very far in a fair fight, because as Hitler said, there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy. The expansive use of the phrase “sexual assault” in the laws allows every deranged co-ed in America a free shot at a male that vexes them. It’s how the mentally unbalanced young woman at Columbia was indulged well past the point where it was clear she needed psychiatric help.

Rape is a very serious crime, which is why we send rapists away for long stretches in nasty prisons. Attempted rape should be similarly punished as we know that sex criminals can never be rehabilitated. This is where penal colonies make a lot of sense. Sexual assault, on the other hand, is a made up crime that is entirely political. It is a weapon used by deranged feminists and lazy cops to bludgeon young men for the crime of having a penis. It’s also why these cases have such a startling low conviction rate. It’s also why so many young women put themselves in dangerous situations.

That last bit is the worst result of the expansive use of sex crimes in the war between the sexes. Young women are led to believe the law is a force field around them, insulating them from their idiotic decisions. That leads young women to going out, getting knee-walking drunk with strange men and then waking up with regrets, if they are lucky. You can bet that some portion of the “rape” problem in Europe has something to do with unattached young woman staggering around wasted at all hours of the night.

For just about forever, humans understood that boys and girls were different, requiring different rules for both. Women need to take care to protect themselves from men and men need to take care of their women, so they are not assaulted by strange men. That is biological reality and the only way our species survives. The abuse of sexual assault is just one of many examples of what happens when the Assemblywomen becomes a law book, rather than a comedy.

The Company Men

Posted on by

Since the major news outlets are run by the Cult, all of the focus has been on how the Cult is dealing with the calamity of November 8, 2016. Even two months on, members of the Cult are throwing tantrums in order draw attention to their grief. For example, two degenerates had to be removed from a plane because they objected to Ivanka Trump riding on the same plane. Unfortunately, the plane was still on the tarmac when they were removed. Then there are the daily hoaxes, which are part of their grieving process.

Less noticed is the ongoing collapse of the Conventional Right into irrelevancy as it copes with the sudden realization that no one cares what they think. National Review, for example, has seen its traffic collapse since they went NeverTrump. The ridiculous person they have running the joint these days is out begging for money to redesign the site again. The implication is that bad technology is the reason no one reads National Review. The fact that they publish nonsense like this gets no mention at staff meetings, I bet.

While it is amusing to watch silly people like Charles Cooke struggle with the reality of his situation, there are some intelligent and thoughtful people in the Conventional Right trying to make sense of things. They correctly see the rise of Trump, and the emergence of a counter culture on the Right, as a dire threat to their thing. After all, why bother consulting the grovelers at National Review when they are always wrong and there are alternatives out there getting it right?

This long piece by Matthew Continetti the other day is a good read for a number of reasons. Continetti is married to a daughter of Bill Kristol and he is a true believer in the neo-conservative faith. Take that however you like. This is the first bit of interest.

I have been thinking about Gavin lately because his life and thought so perfectly capture the conservatism of Donald Trump. When you read Gavin, you begin to understand that the idea of Trump as a conservative is not oxymoronic. Trump is a conservative—of a particular type that is rare in intellectual circles. His conservatism is ignored or dismissed or opposed because, while it often reaches the same conclusions as more prevalent versions of conservatism, its impulses, emphases, and forms are different from those of traditionalism, anti-Communism, classical liberalism, Leo Strauss conservatism in its East and West Coast varieties, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol as well as the neoconservatism of William Kristol, religious conservatism, paleo-conservatism, compassionate conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and all the other shaggy inhabitants of the conservative zoo.

Like most of the box-tickers in the managerial class, Continetti is largely unaware of what constitutes conservatism in English speaking countries. For men of the Conventional Right, conservatism is a list of policies and poses that define their relationship with Progressives. The idea that conservatism is a temperament, rather than a laundry list of policy proposals is alien to these guys. They are men of the multiple choice exam. Their options are always bounded by the number of choices provided to them.

Moving along, this bit offers a glimpse into the mind of the neo-cons as they face the dustbin of history.

Trump has always been careful to distinguish himself from what he calls “normal conservative.” He has defined a conservative as a person who “doesn’t want to take risks,” who wants to balance budgets, who “feels strongly about the military.” It is for these reasons, he said during the campaign, that he opposed the Iraq war: The 2003 invasion was certainly risky, it was costly, and it put the troops in a dangerous position, defending a suspicious and resentful population amid IEDs and sniper attacks. The Iraq war, in this view, is an example of conservative writers and thinkers and politicians following trains of logic or desire to un-conservative conclusions.

One of the things that never gets discussed is just how spectacularly wrong the Conventional Right was about the response to 9/11, particularly Iraq. Everything the neo-cons said about the Muslim world in the Bush years turned out to be wrong – disastrously wrong. There was a prohibition on pointing this out for a while, but Trump said it, in South Carolina of all places, and paid no price for it. Pretty much the only refuge for the neo-cons is to pretend that everyone was wrong and that Trump was just lucky in his opposition to the “invade the world” portion of neo-conservatism.

This bit is comical because it highlights the foreignness of the neo-cons and the Conventional Right.

The conservatism of Donald Trump is not the conservatism of ideas but of things. His politics do not derive from the works of Burke or Disraeli or Newman, nor is he a follower of Mill or Berlin or Moynihan. There is no theory of natural rights or small government or international relations that claims his loyalty. When he says he wants to “conserve our country,” he does not mean conserve the idea of countries, or a league of countries, or the slogans of democracy or equality or freedom, but this country, right now, as it exists in the real world of space and time. Trump’s relation to the intellectual community of both parties is fraught because his visceral, dispositional conservatism leads him to judgments based on specific details, depending on changing circumstances, relative to who is gaining and who is losing in a given moment.

What he is alluding to here is the deeply held belief, among Conventional Conservatives, that the true leaders of society are the men who manipulate ideas, not the men who manipulate other men or manipulate things. The great revulsion for Trump among our betters is they see him as a man that makes his way managing people things. He is not a man who operates in the realm of ideas. Therefore, he is disqualified from leading society. Continetti sees himself as Trump’s intellectual and moral superior.

This bit is laugh out loud funny.

His is a blunt and instinctive and demotic approach arrived at after decades in the zero-sum world of real estate and entertainment contract negotiations. His are sentiments honed by immediate, knee jerk, and sometimes inelegant reactions to events and personalities observed on Twitter or on “the shows.” And the goal of his particular conservatism is not adherence to an ideological program so much as it is to prevent the loss of specific goods: money, soldiers, guns, jobs, borders, national cohesion.

Guys like Continetti would not last five minutes in the world of real estate or the world of fast food, for that matter. If he were to get a job with Trump’s organization, it would be as a doorman or desk clerk. Maybe in a decade or so he could be in a position to make a decision, like selecting a cleaning contractor or a building maintenance vendor. The reason the Conventional Right is in crisis is that normal, conservative people, have grown weary of the smug condescension from useless know-it-alls like Continetti.

In fairness to Continetti, he does seem to be figuring it out a bit.

It is this specificity of attachment rather than adherence to a program that explains the divide between street corner conservatives and their political brethren. Many of the conservatives in Washington, D.C., myself included, arrived at their politics through study or experience at university, by encountering a great text, the coherence of natural law, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the economics of Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, and Tullock. That is not the case for the street corner conservatives.

Continetti cannot bring himself to contemplate how the people he labels “street corner conservatives” arrived at their positions. That would require a degree of self-awareness that he lacks. He is far too concerned with distancing himself from these people, because Conventional Conservatism is nothing more than a buffer between the dominant ideology of Progressivism and the rest of us. In their heads, they are standing athwart history yelling “stop”, but in reality they are standing in front of you yelling “stop.”

I’ve gone way too long so I’ll circle back to this another day, but the whole vibe from the Conventional Right is of a collection of middle managers after a takeover. They are still wrapping their heads around the fact that the guys coming in are now in charge. The old company men will have to demonstrate their worth or be tossed out like obsolete furniture. In the end, they will come around, because they have no choice, but there will be plenty of moaning and complaining along the way.

Happy Kwanzaa!

Posted on by

Video has been updated to play in all countries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajg8QrSsr_A

Here is the late great Tony Snow’s legendary column on Kwanzaa:

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site — as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site — the celebration was designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “G-d Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you’ll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” that “this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope …”

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh.”

His book concludes: “I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it. …. By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today — my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires — derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact.”

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday — Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices — “cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility” — that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: “The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity.”

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas — and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

Europe’s Bloody Future

Posted on by

One aspect of the continuing crisis in Europe that is never discussed is why the people allegedly responsible for the welfare of their people, continue to act so irresponsibly. Closely linked to this is why the people in these countries have been so passive toward their ruler’s flagrant disregard for their duties. In any previous era, the terrorist attack on the Berlin Christmas market would have led to a swift response from government, because doing anything else would have the people in the streets building a scaffold for their rulers.

Germany continues to have a reputation for effective and efficient government administration, despite the fact all the evidence suggests Germany is now run by a collection of thumbless boobs. As someone on Sailer’s site noted, this is not a new thing. Germany has been operating like a drunk on holiday for quite some time. Angela Merkel’s decision to import a million violent low-IQ barbarians is just the most egregious example of the reckless disregard for their duties by the German rulers and the indifference of the German people to it.

It’s not just the Germans, either. The French have been tolerating the importation of useless savages from North Africa for decades. Paris is now a small tourist area surrounded by Bronze Age cavemen. Every election, the French people come out and vote for the guy promising to murder more French citizens, because the alternative risks being called a racist and that’s worse than death. The fact that millions of otherwise sensible people can vote in favor of suicide like this speaks to the power of belief.

The Europeans, at least a great many of them, are infected by the same virus that has infected many Americans. They have embraced the most extreme forms of multiculturalism, where opposition to racism is the highest calling. In America, this results in finding the nearest black guy and parading him around the streets or putting him in the White House. Secondarily it has meant an embrace of open borders and the celebration of degeneracy, but the primary focus is always on race. In recent times, it’s been black history month twelve months a year.

In Europe it is a bit different as they don’t have the long shadow of  the English Civil War and slavery. Instead, the afflicted become convinced that there is no difference between people. Since difference is the sole reason for borders, any hint of a border is tantamount to bringing back Nazism. The result is open borders above all else. Even the small steps they have taken to control the flow of barbarians into Europe were done reluctantly and after many public proclamations about how awful everyone feels about defending themselves from the hordes.

How this has happened is not a topic discussed in polite company or by the chattering classes. Read through all of the news accounts and commentary about the Berlin attack and no where do you see any questions about whether it was wise to import a million barbarians. That’s just assumed. Instead, the speculation is over how the natives somehow drove this poor barbarian to fulfill his purpose as a barbarian. The European media reads like the patient newsletter at an insane asylum.

One cause of this is the Cold War. For close to fifty years, Western Europe was America’s daycare center. Americans did all the heavy lifting with regard to the defense of Western Civilization both militarily and economically. European elites were allowed to play dress up and pretend to be in charge, but everyone knew the Americans were in charge. If something broke, America fixed it. If someone got an ouchy, America would salve their boo-boo. The Pax Americana allowed the West to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence.

The result was at least one generation of leaders lacking any training in responsible government. They dress up like proper rulers, but they have no idea what it means to defend their people. In fact, they don’t even think about the hoi polloi as their people. They are just the great unwashed, an undifferentiated mass of greedy mouths and grasping hands. They were free to evolve this way because the Americans were always there to make sure nothing bad happened. As the protective bubble is removed, all of this being exposed.

At some point, people get tired of being murdered. The young German with a taste for politics is going to start to question why he is loyal to people, who show more concern for foreigners than they do for him. A lesson of the French Revolution is that once people begin to question the legitimacy of the system, everything is soon up for grabs. The reckless disregard for their duties, by people like Merkel, is planting the seeds for something much worse than the monthly Exploding Mohamed we see in the news.

Whether or not it is too late to save Europe is open for debate. It is also possible that more sober minded politicians will rise up, push aside the reckless and begin the task of rebuilding their countries. The future is not written and there is no such thing as the tide of history. Even so, it appears Europe is headed for a very ugly and perhaps bloody reckoning. No society can last when its rulers are perpetually at war with its people and that is what Europe is today. At some point, the people will join the war.

Humbug

Posted on by

I hate Christmas

That’s right. I hate Christmas.

Throughout history, at least since Dickens, guys like me get dubbed a “scrooge” or worse because it is assumed my animus toward the holiday is due to being cheap. Christmas is a gift giving holiday so if you don’t like the holiday, it means you don’t like gift giving. The only people that don’t like gift giving are tightwads and misers. The most famous hater of Christmas is, of course, old Ebenezer from A Christmas Carol, but Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life is a close second. Both are heartless misers of the first order, who are smote by Christmas.

Well, I’m neither of those guys. I don’t have a problem with gift giving. Gift giving at Christmas is one of the few things about the holiday I find heart warming. I enjoy taking the time to think about a nice gift for someone I care enough about to give a gift. Like everyone, I tend to take for granted those around me that care about me. When it is time to buy them a gift, I take the time to think about all the nice things they do for me and I appreciate how lucky I am to have them in my life.

It is a mostly selfish act, of course, We give gifts to say something flattering about ourselves. That something makes us feel good because we hope that others will agree with it. “What a nice gift” implies “what a nice person you are for giving me this gift.” We give the gift to let the other person know we are kind, thoughtful, generous and so forth. It’s not all there is, but it is the big motivator. Jewelry stores exist so men can let women know they are good guys, who can and will provide for them. Diamonds are man’s second best friend, just behind dogs.

The issue I have with gifts is in the receiving. I’m terrible at gift receiving. I always feel like an obligation has been bestowed on me. My ideal Christmas is one where I give the gifts and no one gives me anything. That way I don’t feel obligated to wear the ugly shirt, carry the useless wallet or read the Ann Coulter book. I have been given every one of her damned books and I have yet to read a single one. God bless Ann Coulter, but I would rather have my testicles hooked up to a car battery than read one of her books.

I could live with the gift receiving hassle, but the whole experience is wrapped up in weeks of traffic jams and people acting like idiots. We know retail is way down. We know people are buying more and more stuff on-line. We see the malls and big box stores closing down. Why are there more people out on the streets each year at Christmas? Where are they going? Why are they out driving around and making a nuisance of themselves? The best gift we could get at Christmas is an EMP so no one can go out and drive around for two weeks.

I could even get past the traffic and the hassle of gift getting, but there’s no payoff to Christmas. You make yourself miserable for weeks, open gifts and then nothing. It’s often in a flash. The kids get to play with their toys, but the adults get nothing for their trouble. That’s because Christmas is not a good food holiday like Thanksgiving or a summer cookout. There are treats we associate with the holiday, but America is a rich country overflowing with treats.

The unique foods at Christmas are things like god-awful casseroles and stuffings that taste like ass. As a kid, I was often forced to taste oyster stuffing even though I hated it with the intensity of a thousands suns. No one liked it, which is why it was always left over and then thrown away. The same is true of the casseroles. Bad cooking is not improved by dumping cheese and mushroom soup. Green bean casserole is a crime against nature and should be outlawed. When I’m ruler of these lands, casseroles will be banned.

In fairness, I used to enjoy Christmas mass. When I was a kid, the one thing I really liked about Christmas, the only thing I liked, was the big hullabaloo of Christmas Eve mass. I could just imagine what it was like in the medieval times with candles and torches lighting the church instead of electric lights. A big old church had that ability to awe a person. I’ve always found it comforting to know that I am just one tiny insignificant fleck in the grand tapestry of life. The most miserable people are those who believe they are important.

But, I no longer go to mass so that’s on me. Even so, the terribleness of the modern Christmas far outweighs whatever pleasures I could pluck from it. This is not a new thing either. I’ve felt this way since I was a kid. Once they killed off Santa, I started thinking this holiday was a bit of a rip-off. It’s just one big pitch to buy stuff and spend money. The fact is, Christmas is for cops and kids, as they say in Boston. Most of us just staple a smile on our face and get through it as best we’re able. Another week and life gets back to normal.

Until then, Bah! Humbug!

Immigration

Posted on by

If you had asked me about immigration 30 years ago, I would have shrugged and said it was a good thing for the country. My family, like most everyone I knew, came over from the old country. It was not until I reached adulthood, living in New England, that I became aware of people who traced their roots to the colonial times. Even so, I was trained in the American mythology about a nation of immigrants, so I just assumed immigration was mostly a good thing, when I bothered to think about it, which was not often.

It was only after I came to know recent migrants that I started changing my mind about the topic. The people, who had recently gone through the system, had very different ideas about it than Americans born here. More important, they had no illusions about the state of the population in the old country. Talk to recent migrants and they will be happy to tell you that most of the people they left behind should stay over there. The recent migrants left the old country for a reason.

This came to mind the other day when I sat listening to a Turk and an Indian discuss immigration. Both were Trump people exclusively on the immigration issue. Both had come to America the old fashioned way – legally. The Turk was a Coptic Christian. He left for America thirty years ago as a young man, figuring there was no future for Christians in Turkey. The Indian had come here on a student visa, got a job, fell in love with America and decided to stay. In both cases, it took ten years to gain citizenship.

One of the things you learn from immigrants, when it comes to the immigration issue, is they place a high value on citizenship. That’s because they spent a lot to get it. Acquiring citizenship was a transaction for them, not an accident of birth. The Turk in this story left his home, and all that he knew, because he correctly saw where things were heading in Turkey. He was a guy that sold all his stuff, bought as many black chips as he could afford, and pushed them into the middle of the table.

The other thing immigrants know is that America is a lonely place. Europe, for example, is full of old cities and villages where people grow up in the shadow of ancestors. There’s no fresh start in a place like that. Every man is just a dot on the timeline started by people long ago. In other parts of the world, there’s the shadow of history and the entanglements of tribe and clan. In a place like India, the obligations to family and custom are more limiting than anything government can conjure.

In America, immigrants are free to start their own timeline. The past is no longer a set of boundaries on them. Just as important, they are free of the family and tribal restrictions. The Turk in this story married a Greek woman, who was also an immigrant. The Indian went into a career that does not exist in India and even if it did, his family would not have approved. You can do those things where it is just you, striking out on your own. That’s the attraction of America. It’s a blank canvass for immigrants.

None of this means we should fling open our borders and let the world move to America. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Borders and barriers are a filtering mechanism that helps tamp down the number of bad migrants a country gets. If the Germans had been more scrupulous, for example, they would not have murderous Muslims rampaging through their streets right now. Europe is headed for a very dark time solely due to their rulers forgot that good borders make for good citizens.

America should be learning from this. We have no shortage of workers and we no longer have vast tracks of unexploited land. We could have zero immigration and no jobs would go unfilled. There’s also the cultural aspect. We have had high levels of immigration for half a century, but low levels of assimilation. Even if there is an economic argument for more migrants, and there isn’t, it is far outweighed by the cultural arguments. It will take many generations to absorb the current migrants.

Even so, low levels of legal immigration are probably a good thing. The people willing to go through all the steps it takes to migrate legally are going to be people who scrupulously observe the law. They are not coming here just to screw it all up for everyone including themselves. Recent legal immigrants tend to be hyper-patriotic for that reason. They take nothing for granted because they had to earn their citizenship. Their presence is a healthy reminder that citizenship has value.

That’s ultimately the truth about the open borders crowd. They place no value on citizenship. That’s because they put no value on people. To the open borders enthusiasts, humans are just undifferentiated raw material, inputs they can manipulate. Whether the material comes from home or abroad is irrelevant because everything normal people associate with being human is of no concern to the managerial types. They see people the way normal people look at furniture.