Author: VD

You’re not part of the solution

If you want to know why there is no hope for America, it is because “conservatives” like Roger Simon have successfully managed to put themselves forward as the Right when in fact they are, and have always been, nothing more than the right side of the Left:

When I was young, early twenties, I felt tremendous guilt about what happened to black people in this country, even though my family arrived here fifty years after the freeing of the slaves and were themselves escaping the pogroms of Europe. Those feelings — and a sense of what was right, of course — propelled me into the civil rights movement and I am very proud to have participated. When I moved to Los Angeles and began making money in Hollywood, I still wanted to do something and started to help finance the Black Panther Breakfast Program. The Panthers did seem a bit on the tough side, but somehow I thought it was the right thing to do. Those kids in Watts were hungry, weren’t they? The “black supremacy thing” was just a “phase.”

Well, soon enough it became obvious that I was wrong. The supremacy thing was the least of it. Or a charade. The Panthers were thugs. Even worse, they were murderers and drug dealers. Worst of all, they were a horrible example to their community, a straight line ticket to oblivion.

And when I look at the videos of the New Black Panthers menacing voters in front of the polling place, I see the same thing, the same guys. Any African-American who really cared about his people would want those thugs prosecuted. He wouldn’t want them on the street as am example to the children of the community.

Mr. Simon, you are as wrong today as you were wrong then. You clearly haven’t learned anything about tribal loyalties since you were so magnanimously attempting to structurally alter the very place that offered your family a place of refuge. The easily verifiable fact is that despite your totally irrelevant opinion about what African-Americans should care about or think, no African-American wants to see a few Black Panthers prosecuted for voter intimidation any more than he wanted to see OJ found guilty of murder.

Mr. Simon’s personal history offers a very clear case against the immigration he supports. Notice that he is actually proud of having worked to increase Federal power while successfully weakening individual property rights and the Constitutional right to free association. As Hayek pointed out regarding “social justice”, “civil rights” are not and cannot be unalienable rights endowed by a Creator. They are nothing more than politically inspired, government-granted privileges. While a small amount of immigration can certainly strengthen a society, mass immigration does nothing but alter, weaken, and eventually destroy it. There is no “strength through diversity”, only “conquest through division” a fact that most of history’s great conquerors have known and utilized. You will note that the diversity and immigration advocates never cite any historical examples for the obvious reason that migration, as mass immigration is more accurately labled, has long been the death knell of the societies inundated by it.

For those who missed it before, I note that “the melting pot” is ahistorical fiction written by a hypocritical Zionist and no one who cites it as some sort of societal ideal should be taken any more seriously than a guy wearing a red Star Trek uniform and calling for the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Moreover, the melting pot ideal is at its core nothing more than the usual utopian Marxist transnationalism: “Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man.”

Kicking the Krugster

David Brooks is ever so polite as he expresses his doubts about the Neo-Keynesians call for a Third Stimulus, but there’s no question as to whom he is putting his genteel, moderate boot:

These Demand Siders have very high I.Q.’s, but they seem to be strangers to doubt and modesty. They have total faith in their models. But all schools of economic thought have taken their lumps over the past few years. Are you really willing to risk national insolvency on the basis of a model?

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.

No, they don’t. Nor will they have one for the next ten years. They’ll have an explanation all right – the bitter-end liquidationists didn’t let us spend enough money – but it won’t be a good one or a correct one.

UPDATE – And Krugman is forced to immediately start lying in response. “Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.”

Krugman hopes we’ve all forgotten that he calculated a $600 billion stimulus was needed before the Obama administration championed the $787 billion stimulus passed by Congress.

Cue Derbyshire

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the next revolution:

As grills across America fire up this weekend some Americans may want to crack open a history book instead of a cold beer. A Marist poll finds that 26 percent of Americans dont know whom the United States declared its independence from.

In fairness, there’s not much reason an immigrant from Honduras, Egypt, or Somalia should either know or care about who declared what regarding whom. And one can’t reasonably expect natural-born Americans to have time to learn anything about the Revolution of 1776 in only 12 years of public school when there is so much to learn about Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, the Mayans, and all the other important figures of history who made America what it is today.

The myth of Deist America

I suppose we can’t be surprised that atheists so often get Christian “mythology” factually incorrect when they can’t even keep their own myths straight:

The thinkers who formulated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deists, not theists, and were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment movement in England and Europe.

Pure.. Unadulterated.. Poppycock. This flies completely in the face of serious scholarship on the subject by Dr. Miles Bradford (University of Dallas) in which he careflully examined the religious beliefs of 55 of the framers of the Constituional Convention and found only 3 whose religious leanings were a bit unclear.

For crying out loud, there were nearly as many MINISTERS signing the Declaration of Independence as there were deists. The lesson is to always treat atheists spouting “facts” like Jehovah’s Witnesses “quoting” the Bible. Always, always, always, ask them for their source. Most of the time, when you force them to trace it back, it will turn out to be pure fiction.

The danger of white knighting

It is always heroic to rescue a child. But to “rescue” a woman from “violence against women”? Sometimes, but by no means always. Even the police know that intervening in a domestic situation is dangerously stupid given the roughly 50/50 chance that the woman initiated the violence:

A Good Samaritan who tried to help a stranger being hit by her husband was badly beaten after the man turned on him. Matthew Leone has a broken jaw and one third of his skull has been removed because his brain is swollen after he was beaten earlier this week.

I am totally opposed to the “chivalrous” notions that “you should never hit a woman” and “violence against women is absolutely disgusting”. What does that make violence against men, peachy keen? Either violence is acceptable or it isn’t, and I firmly believe that the Dragon motto of “start nothing, finish everything” applies universally. If a woman is dumb enough to escalate conflict to a physical level with a larger, stronger, and faster opponent, then she absolutely merits any subsequent beating that she takes. People always focus on the “finish everything” half, but the more important one is “start nothing”. Now, if I am attacked, I may choose not to retaliate on the basis of my Christian principles, but that has nothing to do with the sex of the attacker. A decision to let a physical assault pass is my choice and that choice doesn’t negate my absolute self-defense right to respond to the initiation of violence with incapacitating violence.

This doesn’t mean that one should never intervene in a violent situation, but that if one is going to intervene, one must do so in precisely the same manner that one would intervene if two men were fighting. That’s precisely why the police usually handcuff both parties involved first, then attempt to sort the matter out once everyone has been incapacitated. As I have mentioned before, you should never intervene in any violent situation unless you are absolutely certain that an even greater level of violence is justified in stopping it. If one man is stabbing another, then go ahead and blow his head off. If one woman is smashing another woman’s face against the floor, then go ahead and break her wrists. But if all you’re going to do is demand the bigger party – which isn’t necessarily the guilty party – relax while you strike a moral pose at them, you shouldn’t be terribly surprised when you wind up in the hospital.

And given the fact that the woman wasn’t injured and the husband was only charged with a misdemeanor, it’s pretty obvious that the white knight’s intervention not only wasn’t necessary in this case, but actually made a bad situation worse. I tend to doubt that the woman is going to appreciate her husband being needlessly put away in prison for 3-5 years.

WND column

What Are You Celebrating?

The fourth of July is the day to celebrate American independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. But what is the significance of independence from Great Britain when America is kept in dependence by Washington, D.C., and in the case of 11* once-sovereign states, forcibly so?

*This should have been 12. I had forgotten about the forcible seizure and illegal occupation of the sovereign kingdom of Hawaii. Mea culpa.

Go Cops

This is the greatest song about the police since NWA’s epic anthem and actually serves to justify Kesha’s existence on the planet. There has never been a police state without police.

Flipping the flipped script

A fair amount of what this woman writes about is wrong and even the title of this post is misleading, but she grasps the important issues better than most and her core message here is correct. A woman can “tame” even the most hard core player if he is genuinely ready to settle down and raise a family:

The secret to flipping a player is finding one who wants to be flipped. A pretend asshole. A guy who’s gone from beta to bastard and back again. The truth is, a very high percentage of males understand that assholes get laid. Many don’t know what to do about it. Others work hard to acquire skills with women via Game. But many, many young men just flip into acting like jerks. When in doubt, insult her. Walk away. Never show you care. This is surprisingly effective, and it really doesn’t require a bootcamp to role-play this way. Some of these guys will like the action so much, they won’t ever come back from the Dark side. Some will. You gotta figure about 20% of guys getting laid are jerks. The rest are just acting like jerks. That doesn’t make them fun to be around, but it does mean they are susceptible to being poached.

This strikes me as somewhat of a statement of the obvious; since Game concerns the simulation of Alpha behavior, there is going to be a clear difference between the natural Game player and the simulated one. And, of course, it’s true that the simulated Alpha is less likely to be a complete and unrepentant bastard. Now, I do believe even complete bastards can change from ruthless and cold-hearted cad to faithful family man because that’s precisely what happened to me. However, this only came about through the transformative power of Jesus Christ; a woman can enable such a transformation, but I don’t see how she could possibly bring it about on her own.

I think the problem with the beta to bastard and back concept is that as you act, so you eventually become. Few whores start out thinking to earn crack money on the street; they are more likely to embark upon their descent as a low-rent model or fully-clothed cigarette girl at the strip club. (I once placed a bet with a club owner on how long it would take his new cigarette girl to graduate to the stage. I said a month and lost. Two weeks, or more precisely, eight working evenings.) Experience leaves its mark on men too, even if we don’t tend to get that “ridden hard, put away wet” look that is so easy to see on women with a history of promiscuity. (By the way, women, you may wish to note that observant men can usually estimate how many men have had you with a surprising degree of accuracy. It’s a fun party trick, although not one recommended for dinner parties with married couples.) Once a man ceases to put women on pedestals, he is very unlikely to ever do so again, much less become a shield-brandishing White Knight ever ready to defend a mythical honor.

It’s a dangerous game both ways, of course. On the one hand, even Hugh Hefner wanted to settle down and raise a family for a while, but the sentiment passed and soon he was collecting larger and more visible harems than ever before. On the other, a relapsed Game player whose behavior has been tamed into delta or even gamma behavior is going to generate contempt and disgust in the very woman who tamed him… so she will go off and seek another faux alpha to tame or a real one to entertain her. The irony, of course, being that not long after she leaves the relapsed Game player due to his contemptible gammadom, he’ll be back to his old ways with a bitter vengeance, leaving a trail of women half her age strewn behind him in broken-hearted adoration.

This is why I think it is a massive mistake for women to attempt to play alpha-tamer. A real man only does things for his own reasons, (which should not be confused with his self-interest), and unless he is motivated to change his ways by a higher power, any other externally induced change, be it for reasons of romance, fear, familial pressure, or even boredom, is unlikely to last over time.

And it’s even possible that change for all the right reasons could lead a woman to develop some degree of contempt for even the strongest, most attractive man. There is a saying, after all, that no man is a hero to his valet and the intimate familiarity of family life can’t help but breed the occasional eye-rolling, and perhaps even disgust. I doubt that it’s much sexier to clean up after George Clooney’s vomit than anyone else’s. But it’s always important to remember that men are not monkeys, women are not weasels, and both sexes are at least capable of surmounting our biological instincts in our own long-term best interests. That’s why it is wise to recall that love is a choice and it should never be confused with the short-lived chemical cloudburst that sometimes passes for it.

But in the end, if you want a good man, then stop chasing bad ones.

Independence

I find it remarkable that so many Americans still believe they live in a Constitutional democratic republic when it’s quite clear that it is neither Constitutional nor democratic, nor is it even a republic any longer.

Last night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that “deemed as passed” a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the “deeming” document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget. The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed.

Never before — since the creation of the Congressional budget process — has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money.

I mean, Congress isn’t even seriously trying to make things look legitimate anymore. They’re barely bothering to go through the motions and they’re certainly not concerned about whatever the will of the People might happen to be. But please don’t let that get in the way of enjoying your Department of Public Safety-regulated, Division of Fire Safety-approved, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms-licensed pyrotechnics celebrating liberty today.

Don’t cry for me, Maradona

Germany 4
Argentina 0

Germany underlined that their demolition of England was no fluke. They also showed that a world class team needs world class strikers who can actually finish; Miroslav Klose is at the forefront of a powerful and speedy attack that includes Podolski, Özil, and Schweinsteiger. Messi, on the other hand, demonstrated that he’s more of a ball-controlling midfielder than a true striker capable of finishing.

I have to say that the contrast between Maradona and Italy’s Lippi couldn’t have been greater. He was magnanimous in victory against Greece, prompting Spacebunny to wonder if he would be as sporting in defeat. But unlike the fraudulent Lippi, who disappeared into the locker room without a word of consolation to his players or a word of congratulations to the other team, no sooner did the whistle blow than Maradona was out on the field again hugging his players and offering a sincere hand to the other team, this time in congratulations. He is a deeply troubled man, but it’s heartening to see that on the field, he is still a champion.

As for the Ghana game, I am not surprised that the Black Stars found a way to lose it. Uruguay is mentally tough, very mentally tough, as was exemplified by Suarez watching the penalty as he walked backwards towards the locker room after his red card. A forward on the goal line, kicked out of the game, and he still hadn’t given up hope. Like the Americans, Uruguay doesn’t just play to the 90th minute, they fight and scrap and claw until the final whistle blows. I still can’t see them shutting down the high-speed Dutch attack, but the contrast between their relentless spirit and the inexcusable lapse in Dutch effort at the end of the Brazil game does make me think that an upset is not quite as impossible as I would have thought. I still expect the Netherlands to claim the cup, as I predicted at the beginning, but the Dutch should not make the mistake of looking ahead to Germanythe final.