Archive for 2020
December 20, 2020
LATINX IS WOKE AND STUPID, BUT I REPEAT MYSELF: “‘Latinx’ was created in America by people apparently not happy that Spanish is a gender-specific language. It’s a fake-Spanish word that wasn’t created by and isn’t used by Latinos to describe themselves. It’s a shortcut used to identify a huge and very diverse group of people. That term is offensive and people need to stop using it.”
OPEN THREAD. It’s yours.
SO YOU’RE SAYING EARTH IS ONLY LIVABLE BECAUSE OF . . . CLIMATE CHANGE? Ancient Earth had a thick, toxic atmosphere like Venus — until it cooled off and became liveable.
REPUBLICANS NEED TO WELD THESE PEOPLE INTO AN ANGRY MOB AIMED AT THE DEMOCRATS WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR SITUATION: Pain, despair and poverty reach fever pitch for unemployed workers.
A SIDE BENEFIT OF TEACHING: One of my students just got her first journal publication.
WELL, GOOD. IT’S UNSCIENTIFIC GARBAGE. ‘Unconscious bias training’ to be scrapped by ministers. “The training, intended to tackle patterns of discrimination and prejudice, is used in many workplaces. The government says there is no evidence it changes attitudes – and is urging other public sector employers to end this type of training.”
THIS H.L. MENCKEN ESSAY ON GUN CONTROL FROM 1925 is still gold.
The new law that it advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down. It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.
Here I do not indulge in theory. The hard facts are publicly on display in New York State, where a law of exactly the same tenor is already on the books—the so-called Sullivan Law. In order to get it there, of course, the Second Amendment had to be severely strained, but the uplifters advocated the straining unanimously, and to the tune of loud hosannas, and the courts, as usual, were willing to sign on the dotted line. It is now a dreadful felony in New York to “have or possess” a pistol. Even if one keeps it locked in a bureau drawer at home, one may be sent to the hoosegow for ten years. More, men who have done no more are frequently bumped off. The cops, suspecting a man, say, of political heresy, raid his house and look for copies of the Nation. They find none, and are thus baffled—but at the bottom of a trunk they do find a rusted and battered revolver. So he goes on trial for violating the Sullivan Law, and is presently being psychoanalyzed by the uplifters at Sing Sing.
With what result? With the general result that New York, even more than Chicago, is the heaven of footpads, hijackers, gunmen and all other such armed thugs. Their hands upon their pistols, they know that they are safe. Not one citizen out of a hundred that they tackle is armed for getting a license to keep a revolver is a difficult business, and carrying one without it is more dangerous than submitting to robbery. So the gunmen flourish and give humble thanks to God. Like the bootleggers, they are hot and unanimous for Law Enforcement.
Read the whole thing.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: School Choice Reduces Teen Suicide, New Study Finds. When students who face bullying at their public school can go elsewhere, it literally saves lives.
I thought the left was pro-choice and (at least posed as being) against bullying? But curiously, the incoming administration (including what’s left of the cerebrum of their elderly frontman) isn’t happy with school choice: Joe Biden reportedly to be tough on charter schools.
MAYBE. OR MAYBE WE’RE THE FORERUNNERS, THE ANCIENT ONES, THE FIRST GALACTIC CIVILIZATION. The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations. If so, I hope that enough Star Wars / Star Trek stuff survives to leave successors scratching their heads over our lost technological wizardry.
LORDING IT OVER THE REST OF US IS THE ENTIRE POINT: Dr. Birx Took Family Trip to Delaware After Thanksgiving, Despite Her Own COVID Advice.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, traveled to a family vacation home in Delaware the day after Thanksgiving, despite her own guidelines recommending that people avoid travel and large family gatherings. Members of Birx’s family from two different households were in attendance, the Associated Press reported on Sunday: her husband, daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren. Birx told the AP that she did not travel for the purpose of celebrating the holiday, but was there for the “winterization of the property before a potential sale.” She also argued that everyone there was in her “immediate household,” while acknowledging that they lived in different homes.
Flashbacks:
● Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry Outing Crystallizes the Arrogance of COVID-19 Dictators.
● San Francisco Mayor London Breed had her own French Laundry party — the night after Gavin Newsom’s.
As Stephen Kruiser suggested: Let’s Start Jailing Lawmakers Who Violate Their Own COVID Restrictions. “Imagine the pure, poetic justice of seeing Newsom, Cuomo, and some of the other Hitler youth (stole that from Animal House) cooling their heels in a holding cell after being caught with their masks off and their pants down.”
MARK JUDGE: The World’s Worst Self-Help Guru.
Saying this honestly is what makes Hollis’ work [James Hollis, author of Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times] so bracing. Hollis would understand why he was one of the first people I sought out in the fall of 2018, after becoming he target of one off the most vicious and evil political hits in recent history. I was tossed into a maelstrom of false accusations, rumors and lies involving a claim that I witnessed a sexual assault, a story that no one who was apparently involved with was able to corroborate.
Soon after the fiasco ended, Hollis was giving a series of lectures at the Jung Society of Washington. I knew that Hollis would understand what I was enduring. I’d survived, as a friend said, “the entire world projecting its shadow onto you.” According to Jung, the work of our lives is not accolades or sunny happiness, but finding our destiny while “integrating the shadow”—i.e., confronting and accepting our dark sides. If we don’t, we wind up projecting our shadow onto others. For several weeks, the media, political activists, and anyone with anger or psychological issues transposed their shadow onto me.
Still, it seemed the culmination of something I’d been preparing for. I’d gotten sober in 1990, a change that forced me to listen to my soul as well as see the evil in the world with clear eyes. I abandoned a promising freelancer position at The Washington Post because I could see the censorious, totalitarian direction that the media and its liberal cheerleaders were going in. Better to live freely and die poor.
By the time the enemy arrived at Helm’s Deep in 2018, I’d no illusions of what I was up against, or what was about to happen. It was to be a Maoist-style mauling. Faced with extortion, career ruin, a shame storm and the threat that my lifelong friends would be destroyed if didn’t lie, I answered with the words Aragorn offered as the orcs approached and he was told his people were about to get wiped out: I will stay and die as one of them.
Read the whole thing.
OLD AND BUSTED: We Are All Socialist Now.
—The Washington Post, through then subsidiary publication Newsweek, February 16th, 2009.
The New Hotness? We Are All National Socialist Now:
I’m so old, I can remember the DNC-MSM getting the vapors over imagined “rats” in a Republican campaign ad in 2000: “Democrats smell campaign rat.” Who knew it was merely a case of projection?
In 2015, Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who drew the above image, “published (then unpublished) a disgusting piece depicting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s daughters as toy monkeys and ‘fair game’ since they appeared in a campaign ad, ABC’s Good Morning America ignored the story completely while CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today excused it as merely a ‘feud’ and part of ‘increased scrutiny’ for Cruz as he ascends in the polls.”
THE LATE NIGHT PALACE GUARD IS BACK! Jonathan Turley: Joe Biden is proud of Hunter — Stephen Colbert’s embarrassing interview misses the mark.
As original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts liked to quip, “you can only be avant-garde for so long, before you become garde,” or palace guard, as in the case of today’s late night hosts.
“AS A RESULT OF PREGNANCY TERMINATIONS:” Prenatal testing has halved the number of babies born with Down syndrome in Europe.
I BLAME DIEBOLD: What Happened to the Democrats Who Never Accepted Bush’s Election. The 2004 vote-fraud conspiracy movement never really died. What does that mean for Trump’s true believers—and America?
(Classical reference in headline.)