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Archive for 2019
July 4, 2019
BRENT BOZELL AND TIM GRAHAM: Trolling the Fourth of July.
Liberals are loudly denouncing President Trump for his plans to insert himself into Fourth of July festivities in the nation’s capital, He’s announced he’ll deliver a speech, as if that is unique, and provide tanks for the parade, as if that’s controversial. And so they compare Trump to Kim Jong Un.
But then there are others who are using this anniversary to take it in the opposite direction. Those same leftists are using the celebration of our nation to attack her. Their actions are deliberately designed to offend…to grab everyone’s attention…to please the people who really can’t stand the thought of American exceptionalism. This nation needs to be diminished. Why not do so on her birthday? Here’s some evidence.
Speaking of diminishing the nation, Rod Dreher writes that it’s a form of battlefield preparation by the left:
I can hear the squawking from liberals now: How can you blame the entire Left for this? How can you actually believe that a corporation’s decision about a shoe, and a city council’s decision about a local holiday, matters? Nike has a right to do what it did, and so does the Charlottesville city council! Anyway, what about this terrible thing Trump did, and this one, and the other one? Et cetera.
I have to chuckle. This is profoundly ignorant of how ordinary people think. Don’t you people get it? Little things like this are part of a developing narrative, one that emerges from the actions of people like campus activists, media and academic figures, city councils, and Woke Capitalists in corporate boardrooms. The narrative is this: the American nation is illegitimate, the American nation is wicked at its roots, America is loathsome. If we are going to dissolve this old, bad America, and replace it with something better, then we are going to need to start by teaching her people to hate her through and through. Meanwhile, let’s open the borders to let in a better class of future American.
Attacking figures like Jefferson, and symbols like the Colonial-era flag — again, not the Confederate flag, but a Colonial-era flag — make it clear that what’s under assault now by the Social Justice Warriors — not fringe campus hotheads, but institutionalists like senior corporate executives and city council members — is the symbolic core of America herself. Not Southern secessionists who fought to preserve slavery, but the Founders and the Founding. These symbols are as close as the secular realm gets to sacred. Elementary psychology says that you do not profane what is sacred to a tribe, unless you want war.
Fortunately, as Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line today, “I don’t think the culture wars are over. I think we have just begun to fight.” Let’s hope so.
ABRAMS TANK PHOTOS FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY: Yes, these fine vehicles are suddenly controversial among certain political fashionistas and obnoxious leftist media operatives. The first photo is appropriate to the holiday. A U.S. Army M1A2 Abrams celebrates with some 120 mm fireworks at Ft. Irwin, California. Yes, it’s dug in. I’ll find a few photos with the entire tank. Ah: a 4th Infantry Division M1A2 photographed in the wild. This tank has encountered a wild camel, “somewhere” in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. Here’s a 1st Infantry Division Abrams tank company (with a couple of other vehicles) moving along a tank trail in Hohenfels, Germany. (I did this at Hohenfels a time or two…or three.) Photo snapped in June 2018. To think those pitiful DC protesters went goosey over a handful of armored vehicles. Tsk. And from Tsk to TUSK. This Abrams tank photo is an educational composite: an M1A2 encircled by its TUSK equipment — Tank Urban Survival Kit. The TUSK is for encountering far more ferocious and competent enemies than idiot leftist demonstrators and CNN reporters on the sidewalks of DC. The real wild: a photo of a 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment tank commander (TC) in his M1A1 Abrams (earlier version) as it patrols Tal Afar, Iraq in 2006. Nice shot in many respects. Note the sergeant’s eyes. I’ll guess he’s glancing back to check on the position of a overwatch tank or infantry fighting vehicle to his rear. There are many possibilities. The photo shows how the fabulous .50 caliber machine gun (Ma Deuce) mounts on an Abrams. One last beau geste. May 2018: A USMC M1A1 Abrams drives into a Finnish sunset.
RELATED: Paul Mirengoff of Power Line destroys “a lefty critic for the Washington Post” who objected to…well, it appears this virtue signaler objects to the U.S. military as well as its vehicles. Here’s a Power Line dagger: “A military display doesn’t politicize the Mall unless you dislike the U.S. military. It’s the left that has politicized the event by using it as yet another means of bashing Trump.” Read the entire post.
TYLER O’NEIL: In Defense of ‘Shocking’ Displays of Patriotism.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
SARAH HOYT ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN VIA ROBERT HEINLEIN: A Writer As Big As America.
“WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT”: The Geometry of Liberty.
IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES: Wolf of Wall Street Producer Riza Aziz Arrested in Malaysia on Money Laundering Charges.
SARAH HOYT: And Our Flag Was Still There.
And remember George Patton: “Take not counsel of your fears.”
REVOLUTION IS A POLITICAL ACT: We May Consent to be Governed but We Do Not Consent to be Ruled.
ROGER KIMBALL ON THE JOYS OF INDEPENDENCE DAY IN LONDON: “Dr Johnson, who was right about so many things, was certainly about London: when a man is tired of London, he said, he is tired of life.” Plus a look at what’s coming in the next few weeks:
Mrs May will be history in a couple of weeks and tout le monde is wondering what, or rather who, comes next. The chief, indeed the only contenders at this point are Jeremy Hunt, Mrs May’s foreign secretary, and the polymathic moppet Boris Johnson, the journalist, former mayor of London, and Mr Hunt’s predecessor as Mrs May’s foreign secretary. Nine out of 10 people say that Boris will be the next prime minister. I think they are right, and I rejoice, since I think that Boris will be a breath of fresh air and that he will, as promised, deliver Britain from its soft servitude to the EU by October 31 of this year.
Fairness requires that I acknowledge that approximately every 10th person loathes Boris Johnson and believes — or at least hopes — that he will somehow come a cropper before the vote later this month. One wretched neighbor recorded a row between Boris and his girlfriend, sent the audio to the Guardian, and sat back in smug self-satisfaction when the story became a sensation.
Alas for them, the sensation was as evanescent as a bad odor on a windy day and now, on July 4, it seems almost certain that Boris will prevail.
Read the whole thing.
SIGNIFICANT EARTHQUAKE HITS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: Fortunately, it happened in a relatively unpopulated area. I didn’t feel it here in San Diego, but it has reminded me I need to update my preparations.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE? Mad Magazine to Effectively Shutter After 67 Years:
The beloved satire publication will no longer be sold on newsstands after the August issue, and future editions will no longer feature new content and instead shift to previously published material — with new covers.
MAD Magazine, the irreverent and highly influential satirical magazine that gave the world Alfred E. Neuman, will effectively cease publication some time later this year after 67 years, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
Sources tell THR that after issue 9, MAD will no longer be sold on newsstands and will only be available through comic book shops as well as mailed to subscribers. After issue 10, there will no longer be new content in subsequent issues save for the end-of-year specials (those will be all-new). Beginning with issue 11, the magazine will only feature previously published content — classic and best-of nostalgic fare — from its massive fault of the past 67 years. DC, however, will also continue to publish MAD books and special collections.
On Wednesday night, MAD cartoonists David DeGrand and Evan Dorkin took to social media to confirm and lament the closure of the magazine. The news follows writer Dan Telfer’s tweet earlier this week about being laid off as a senior editor at the magazine.
As Comic Book.com notes, it’s tough to be a humor publication in a bifurcated America:
The 2017 reorganization and subsequent 2018 reboot both struggled with finding an identity for MAD in an increasingly satire-saturated world. Between websites that can deliver topical comedy in real time and a fiercely divided American populace who cannot agree on what comedy is because their preferences break down along party lines, MAD struggled to find an elusive niche. When political humor seemed to work, MAD doubled down on lampooning the Trump administration, which earned some critical praise but likely alienated conservative readers as well as putting the magazine in direct competitions with late night shows that were delivering content nightly rather than once every two months.
Although doubling-down on leftwing humor has kept that industry going as their audience increasingly contracts.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
WHAT SIMILARLY DESTRUCTIVE PREFERENCES DO OUR OWN ELITES HOLD? Elites’ preference for maize led to the collapse of the Maya civilization.
THEY BELONG ON THE MALL: US Armed Forces Are Defenders of Liberty, Not Tools of Oppression.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Aerobic, resistance exercise may reduce coronary risk for people with belly fat.