Don’t mess with Texas

The Texas governor fires a warning shot:

“The Supreme Court has abandoned its role as an impartial judicial arbiter and has become an unelected nine-member legislature. Five Justices on the Supreme Court have imposed on the entire country their personal views on an issue that the Constitution and the Court’s previous decisions reserve to the people of the States.

“Despite the Supreme Court’s rulings, Texans’ fundamental right to religious liberty remains protected. No Texan is required by the Supreme Court’s decision to act contrary to his or her religious beliefs regarding marriage.

“The Texas Constitution guarantees that ‘[n]o human authority ought, in any case whatsoever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion.’ The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion; and the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, combined with the newly enacted Pastor Protection Act, provide robust legal protections to Texans whose faith commands them to adhere to the traditional understanding of marriage.

“As I have done in the past, I will continue to defend the religious liberties of all Texans—including those whose conscience dictates that marriage is only the union of one man and one woman. Later today, I will be issuing a directive to state agencies instructing them to prioritize the protection of Texans’ religious liberties.”
– Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas

Not bad. I’d rather see the governor declare independence, but it’s a start.

Fire Irene Gallo

Hey, SJWs, do tell us again how it is totally unthinkable that anyone could lose a job as a consequence of a private Facebook post:

North Charleston police officer was fired from his position after posting a photo on Facebook featuring the Confederate flag. WCIV reports the post, which featured the officer wearing Confederate flag boxer shorts, went viral Thursday after it was posted a few days earlier.

The police chief terminated Sgt. Shannon Dildine’s position, saying the photo questioned his ability to improve trust and instill confidence between citizens and officers.

“Your posting in this manner led to you being publicly identified as a North Charleston Police officer and associated both you and the Department with an image that symbolizes hate and oppression to a significant portion of the citizens we are sworn to serve,” Police Chief Eddie Driggers wrote, as reported by WCIV.

The continued refusal of Tor Books to hold Irene Gallo responsible for her actions demonstrates that labeling Tor’s customers “racist neo-Nazis” and Tor’s own books “bad-to-reprehensible” is observably acceptable to its management, no matter what feeble protests Tom Doherty may offer.

Sgt. Dildine posted a picture of himself. Irene Gallo attacked her employer’s customers, her employer’s authors, and her employer’s products. Why on Earth is she still employed by that employer?

Remember

“I bathe in your sweet, sweet wingnut tears.”
– Anne Marie E Dickey

“Worst person in SF is angry and upset well SHUCKY DARN.”
– Christopher Bird

When the SJWs come crying to us about how we’re steamrolling them, disqualifying them, and disemploying them, remember how they acted when they thought they were winning. And show them the appropriate amount of mercy.

I’m neither angry nor upset. I’m not even remotely surprised. But I am deeply concerned about what is going to come next for the USA, because events appear to be proceeding more or less as I anticipated them 20 years ago.

More emanations and penumbras

And thus ends the last pretense of democracy in America:

The Supreme Court has declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States. Gay and lesbian couples already can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The court’s ruling on Friday means the remaining 14 states, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans on same-sex marriage.

Five people can declare a fish to be a horse if they like, but that doesn’t make it so. What’s so tragic about the abandonment of both traditional morality and the last vestiges of democracy in America is that it was done for such a petty little cause.

I observed that America was dead 11 years ago in a column entitled “You Can’t Fix a Corpse”. This is just the corpse beginning to stink.

It’s wryly amusing to recall all those Republicans who swore that the solution was to elect Republicans so they could nominate Supreme Court Justices. How did that work out for you, especially in light of what I predicted back in 2004.

Any last vestiges of hope in the Republican Party have been shattered by
the current regime, wherein a Republican President, Republican House,
Republican Senate and Republican-nominated Supreme Court have
demonstrated that they have zero interest in the timeless vision of
America’s founders. Supporting them in the hopes that they will revive
American liberties is akin to hoping that shock paddles will suffice to
revive a month-old corpse. American freedom is not only dead, it has
been rotting for some time.

Diversity in action

I wonder what Apple and Walmart and Amazon will ban in response to this murderous attack:

A man has been decapitated and dozens more injured at a gas product factory in France by terrorists carrying Islamist banners.

The attack took place at the headquarters of the American owned Air Products, in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, near the city of Lyon, in the south east of the country.

The murder is believed to have been accompanied by several explosions on the site cause by a terrorist igniting small ‘gas bombs’ that injured dozens of factory workers. It is believed the explosions may have intended to blow up the entire factory site but failed.

The murdered man’s head is understood to have been found 30 feet away from his body, hanging on the factory’s fence. The dead man’s head was covered in Arabic ‘inscriptions’ before being placed on the fence, according to local journalists at the scene.

Maybe if the French were nicer to them, they would stop beheading people. And remember, although all white people are responsible for Dylann Roof’s actions, no one should mistakenly blame anyone else besides the actual beheader at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier.

Remember, the positive effects of diversity in communities are well-documented. If
France is to continue to grow and prosper, the French must make it a
more inclusive place.

UPDATE: 27 tourists killed in Tunisia hotel attacks:

Gunmen have killed at least 27 people in an attack on two tourist hotels in a Tunisian town popular with British holidaymakers. Tourists fled from the beach in Sousse to take refuge in hotel rooms after guns were fired on the beach. One man said his son saw someone get shot as he raced back to the hotel from the sea. Photographs seen by Sky News show one man in his 60s or 70s lying in a pool of blood in his swimming shorts.

Obviously Tunisia lacked diversity. If only they had been more inclusive, none of this would have happened.

We’d like you better if you were losing

The commenters at File 770 have some advice for the Puppies:

Shambles: “I think a good thing for the puppies would be new leadership; an even better thing would be to walk away from Beale; and the best thing would be to realize each member is welcome as an individual and it’s not necessary to create voting blocks for individually nominated and voted upon awards.” 

Bruce Baugh: All of this. Having a collaborative effort to assess and improve conservative fans’ and creators’ image within fandom seems well worthwhile, but it needs to come from someone who hasn’t glorified hate-mongering and vandalism and who actually does respect other fans and the volunteers who make this all happen.

Ah, if only we were more like them and had new leadership who respected them and was more interested in improving our image in their eyes than in drinking wine from their silvered skulls. Although to be honest, the more I read what they write, the more I fear they won’t make for much more than shot glasses.

What do you say, Rabids? In the place of a Dark Lord shall there be a Bright and Obsequious Queen, who shall make it her top priority to seek favor in the eyes of science fiction’s SJWs?

Or shall we make ourselves thrones of their bones once the VFM are done chewing on them?

Bienvenue, #GamerGate

If you support #GamerGate, you are invited to join Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and me at Le Killy-Jen in the 12ème arrondissement on July 11th at 8 PM for GGinParis. It’s an entirely casual affair and any #GamerGaters who can make it are welcome to come and meet up in the flesh. Buy your own drinks, buy Milo a drink, arm-wrestle Mike, or sit on the terrace, light a Gauloise, and argue with me about whether or not games truly represent Richard Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk, regardless, a good time will be had by all.

As far as excitement goes, we’re anticipating a little less than GGinDC experienced with the bomb threat, but as you might expect, anti-GGers are greeting this with all the civility and bonhomie that we have learned to expect from SJWs around the world. After I posted the initial graphic, one Vincent M in the Ile de France responded as follows:

Vincent M.@vnz
Misère, je découvre l’existence d’une réunion de gamergateux à Paris, le #GGinParis. Prenons nous a rêver : suicide collectif ? Sivouplait ?

Damn, I discovered the existence of a meeting of GamerGaters in Paris, the #GGinParis. Can we dream of a collective suicide? Please?

Keep that in mind the next time you hear SJWs complaining about how terrible, awful, and very bad GamerGate is. We dream of better games. They dream of collective suicide.

Corporate action or censorship?

I don’t know how legitimate these reports are, but there is something bizarre about the level of coordination and specificity of this multi-corporation attack on the Confederate flag. There are several reports that it was ordered by the U.S. federal government. The reason I’m a little dubious is: why would any corporation as powerful as Walmart, Amazon, or Apple obey such an obviously unlawful, unconstitutional directive instead of going straight to the media about it?

The misrule of law

And the rule of lying men. This should suffice to explode any last lingering doubts about the survival of the rule of law in the USA:

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

Roberts continued, “In this instance, the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.” Using the acronym for the Supreme Court, Scalia said his colleagues have twice stepped in to save the law from what Scalia considered worthy challenges.

“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so,” Scalia wrote.

Scalia added, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words ‘established by the State.’ And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words ‘by the State’ other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges.”

The USA presently enjoys not only the rule of men, but the rule of lying men rather than law. And, needless to say, Chief Justice Roberts helpfully demonstrates that electing more Republicans is not going to solve the problem.

Apple removes Civil War games

I almost wish I owned Apple products so I could stop using them in light of this:

Apple Removes All American Civil War Games From the App Store Because of the Confederate Flag

Many large US companies, like Walmart and Amazon, have already banned the sale of any Confederate flag merchandise as a reaction to the recent events. Now, it appears that Apple has decided to join them by pulling many Civil War wargames from the App Store. As of the writing of this story, games like Ultimate General: Gettysburg and all the Hunted Cow Civil War games are nowhere to be found.

I assume WWII games are next. Orwell was right. The totalitarians of the Left love nothing so much as erasing history. Some of the games removed:

  •     Ultimate General: Gettysburg
  •     AAA American Civil War Cannon Shooter
  •     Civil War: Hidden Mysteries
  •     Civil War The Battle Game
  •     Civil War Defense
  •     Civil War Battle Defense
  •     1861 A Civil War Rebellion
  •     Civil War: 1862
  •     Civil War: 1863

I’m buying Ultimate General: Gettysburg today to support one of the developers who have refused to modify their game in accord with Apple’s demands.

As you may have been already informed, Apple has removed our game from AppStore because of usage of the Confederate Flag. Ultimate General: Gettysburg could be accepted back if the flag is removed from the game’s content.

We accept Apple’s decision and understand that this is a sensitive issue for the American Nation. We wanted our game to be the most accurate, historical, playable reference of the Battle of Gettysburg. All historical commanders, unit composition and weaponry, key geographical locations to the smallest streams or farms are recreated in our game’s battlefield.

We receive a lot of letters of gratitude from American teachers who use our game in history curriculum to let kids experience one of the most important battles in American history from the Commander’s perspective.  

Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” did not try to amend his movie to look more comfortable. The historical “Gettysburg” movie (1993) is still on iTunes. We believe that all historical art forms: books, movies, or games such as ours, help to learn and understand history, depicting events as they were. True stories are more important to us than money.

Therefore we are not going to amend the game’s content and Ultimate General: Gettysburg will no longer be available on AppStore.