WND column

The Pledge of Irrelevance

Sensing victory this fall, the Republicans have released a Pledge to America in imitation of the Contract With America that helped trigger the 1994 congressional landslide. Although Obama’s unpopularity is such that a blind and flatulent wombat with a criminal record could probably win election so long as it was running as a Republican, the Republican leadership clearly wants to set the stage for claiming some sort of mandate should they take control of both the House and Senate, as appears likely.

But the mandate they are seeking is not exactly the one that the nation is demanding. Consider what they claim to be their first and most urgent domestic priority, which presumably is not their most urgent priority or it would not require the disclaimer. Is it addressing the staggering amount of public debt owed by the U.S. government? Is it dealing with the crippling $40 trillion in private debt that has millions of homes underwater on their mortgages? Is it combating the mass invasion of Central and South Americans that has altered the very socio-political structure of the nation?

No. What is on offer is nothing more than a promise for even more federal micromanagement of the economy that we witnessed during the course of the Bush and Obama administrations. Only this time, they’re going to do it righ

The police cover-up continues

Confederate Yankee reports on the inquest:

So it would appear that the prosecutors and the police are indeed on the same page in this case. Whatever animosity they might bear toward each other is being put aside and a common front presented. What is the significance of the apparent approach of the police and prosecutors to date? Even if one accepts their theory that Scott was a drug addict and an aggressive gun nut intent on carrying a gun wherever he wanted, who, through gross drug-induced impairment, brought about his own death, all of this should rightfully be nothing more than mitigating evidence that might have some bearing on the severity of a charge to be brought against the officers, or to be considered only after a potential future conviction as mitigating factors relating to sentencing.

What still remains is what the officers knew or reasonably could have known or inferred at the time they confronted Scott at the main entrance of Costco and made the decision to pull the trigger. It is this event, compressed in time, that should be the prosecutor’s foremost concern. Scott’s life history and his physical and mental health status could have, in at least some way, put him on a collision course with the police that day. But the ultimate question is whether they, knowing nothing about Scott but what they heard on the radio on the way to Costco, and apparently finding themselves surprised when a Costco employee suddenly pointed out a man they had never before seen, were justified under the law by his actions in the handful of seconds before they fired at least seven rounds into him. Under this, the only standard that truly matters, the evidence presented at the Inquest does not yet tend to favor or conclusively exonerate the police.

There is no question that the police are lying. The fact that the man was shot five times in the back, and that an ambulance driver saw them take Scott’s holstered weapon out of his waistband and put it on the ground, is enough to condemn them of not only an unlawful and lethal shooting, but obstruction of justice as well.

One police officer commented: “Seems as if many here are not willing to give Law Enforcement the benefit of the doubt until the inquest is over. This saddens me as a Police Officer and retired Marine.”

No, we’re not. Because Law Enforcement doesn’t merit it anymore. Not all cops are murderers, thieves, and pedophiles, but most cops are willing to look the other way whenever their “brother” cops commit crimes. And that is why they fully merit the contempt in which they are now held by so many Americans. A badge is not a license to commit more crime than the average civilian, it is an indication that the police are to be held to a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.

Sailer on Chesteron

On willful short-sightedness:

Why do people think it intelligent to say, “I can see no difference!” It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted.

It is rather amusing to witness the contortions that people, even those who are supposedly dedicated to materialism and science, will go through rather than simply admit what they are observing. Because there is no such thing as equality of any kind, not material, not legal, not social, not cultural, nor spiritual, it is provable nonsense to declare that women are equal to men, that white Americans are equal to [insert color here] [insert national identity here], or that cows are equal to horses.

We’re #37

The Right Wing News has named Vox Popoli the 37th best conservative blog. I appreciate that Mr. Hawkins thinks well of the blog, but I do find it to be somewhat ironic in that I am not a political conservative. But, I suppose that I am somewhat of a religious reactionary and there are a lot of conservatives who comment here, so it’s not a totally unreasonable inclusion.

VPFL Week Two

79 Blackmouth Banksters (2-0)
49 Mounds View Meerkats (0-2)

77 Winston Reverends (2-0)
54 Judean Rhyneauxs (1-1)

52 Bane Sidhe (1-1)
36 RR Redbeards (1-1)

85 Valders Quixotes (1-1)
50 MS Swamp Spartans (0-2)

76 Meigs Marauders (1-1)
49 Greenfield Grizzlies (1-1)

It is suddenly beginning to look like my much-ballyhooed first-year starting RBs are worthless. Considering that I picked them up in lieu of two keepers, this appears to have been a very poor decision.

The 10-percent myth

Putting the statistical nail in Kinsey’s coffin:

More than 480,000 people or one per cent of the UK?s adult population regard themselves as gay or lesbian while a further 245,000 or 0.5 percent say they are bisexual, according a study published by the Office for National Statistics. The data has been collected by the new Integrated Household Survey (IHS), which is the largest social report ever produced for the ONS. The 450,000 individual respondents to the survey provided the biggest pool of UK social data after the national census, the statistics service said.

Despite having a) played in a band signed to a gay music label, and b) having a gay fan club, I have never subscribed to the myth that ten percent of the population is gay. First, because I don’t trust round numbers. Second, because of the thousands of people I’ve met over time, far fewer than 10 percent of them were not normally oriented despite the fact that I was acquainted with a lot more gay men and bisexual women than nearly anyone else I knew.

And, of course, no one could ever provide a credible citation. I’ve always assumed the correct number was around 2 percent, which appears to be more in line with the statistical reality. The fact is that gays tend to lead very troubled lives, not because of homophobia or the contempt of the normally-oriented as many would like to believe, but because abnormality of any kind is not easy. Gays do not deserve approval for their inclinations but neither do they merit contempt. I think the correct response to someone announcing they are gay is “I’m sorry”, not because homosexuality is hateful, but because it’s not an easy journey through life.

Sham democracy in Sweden

In case it’s not already sufficiently apparent to you that neither the American nor European political elites actually give a damn about democracy, the Swedes are underlining this observable fact:

Members of several Swedish political parties are calling for a restructuring of the Riksdag [the Swedish parliament] to minimize the influence of the far-right Sweden Democrats. The parties are investigating whether it is possible to shift the make-up of parliamentary committees to reduce the sway of the far-right, anti-immigrant party which was voted into parliament for the first time at the weekend’s general elections, several Swedish dailies reported. Both Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderate [center-right] Party and the main opposition Social Democrats are reportedly involved.

“Democracy” in both Europe and America is a complete sham. It’s nothing more than rhetorical propaganda; countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are invaded in the name of bringing democracy to their peoples even as genuine democracy is routinely crushed through the use of the courts in the United States and parliamentary rules in European countries.

In the USA, it doesn’t matter if you vote for Democrats or Republicans because you’re going to get essentially the same government either way. The differences are only at the margins and it is more accurate to think of them as a single bi-factional ruling party rather than two rival parties that subscribe to different ideologies. As Sweden is demonstrating, if it were possible to significantly transform society against the will of the trans-party political elite through voting, voting would be made irrelevant.

At this point, it is clear that despite all of the genuine dangers of democracy, representative democracy is actually worse. Since the tactic of expanding the franchise has rendered the limits of representation worse than toothless, the best strategy is to support real democracy. Therefore, I am thinking of changing my party identification from Christian Libertarian to Technodemocrat. But not Democrat in the sense of the modern U.S. Democratic Party, I mean a full and open democracy that dispenses with all of the limitations on the will of the people imposed by representative democracy in favor of technodemocracy.

The unfortunate fact is that the idea of protecting the minority against the will of majority has been utilized to impose the will of the corporatist oligarchy on the majority. Therefore, it would be a significant improvement to remove all limits on the will of the majority.

Feminists get their kneepads

Albeit this time they are peace camp rather than presidential:

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes…. Aloni-Sedovnik cites two specific cases which she has knowledge of – one is a case of rape and another is “severe sexual harassment.” The attackers in both cases, she stresses, were familiar with the victims and knew that they were “peace activists.” The rape occurred several months ago in the village of Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem. The victim, an American activist, wanted to press charges but leftist activists put pressure on her not to do so, so as not to damage the struggle against the ‘occupation.’

With feminism, as with other left-wing movements, the ideology always trumps the individual.

Erik Scott memorial blog

The father of the military veteran shot dead by Las Vegas police addresses the upcoming attempt to assassinate his son’s character:

The Clark County Coroner’s Inquest Hearing into my son’s slaying on July 10th at the Summerlin Costco store will be held in Las Vegas, NV, this week. As a one-sided, unchallenged insult to the tenets of U.S. due process, the hearing promises to be quite a show. And that’s exactly how it should be viewed: As a deadly serious TV reality show. It will be nauseating amateur theater carefully orchestrated and controlled by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and their joined-at-the-hip ally, the District Attorney’s office.

This “Coroner’s Cop-Clearing Circus” is billed as an informal “fact-finding” exercise, but facts will be in short supply. Instead, this abomination of justice has only two objectives: To destroy Erik Scott’s reputation, and to exonerate the three Metro officers who gunned down Erik in a crowd of approximately 50 people, shooting him seven times. At least five of those rounds were fired into Erik’s back, after he was on the ground, convulsing, bleeding profusely, fighting for air, and dying a painful, needless death. His heart and lungs had been destroyed by hollow-point bullets that slammed into his body at high velocity, then mushroomed, ripping his insides to shreds.

Metro officers and the DA will attempt to shift the jury’s and TV audience’s attention far away from the facts of Erik’s horrific, senseless killing. First, we’ll hear that the Costco surveillance video recordings (or the store’s “critical cameras,” if we’re to believe Sheriff Gillespie’s latest comments) were “unusable,” thanks to a mysterious hard-disk “glitch.” Don’t believe it. I don’t. Any digital security-video system deployed by a $73-billion-per-year corporation that ranks Number 25 on the Fortune 500 list will have multiple hard-disk backups onsite. Further, the video will be streamed offsite to a remote storage location. I guarantee there’s an unadulterated copy of that video somewhere, but Metro will not allow it to be seen by the family, our attorney, Ross Goodman, or Las Vegas citizens.

If those videotapes are “lost” or “destroyed”, that will constitute compelling evidence, bordering on absolute proof, that the three officers involved, one of whom has shot three people in his five years as a “law enforcement officer”, murdered Mr. Scott’s son. Lethal abuses of authority, compounded by the criminal coverup, should be punished much more harshly than ordinary first-degree murders by citizens not given badges by the state and local governments. Which reminds me, it is both ironic and pathetic that so many law enforcement officers attempt to portray their occupation as non-civilian and pseudo-military even when they are defending the murder of a real military man by their civilian brother officers.

Reading through the memorial blog, am amazed by Mr. Scott’s restraint and wish him the very best in seeking justice for his slain son. Given the apparent facts, I would find it very difficult to blame him if he instead elected to personally behead those three cops and their family members with a rusty butter knife.

In the meantime, Confederate Yankee adds to his ongoing summation of the shooting.

Review of the year

In which the OC brings to our attention another milestone in the long descent of the publishing industry into the dustbin of history.

n June 20, 2002, the United States Supreme Court decreed, in the case of Atkins v. Virginia, that the mildly mentally retarded were categorically exempt from capital punishment, reasoning that fully functional adults of diminished mental capacity were as a matter of law not as culpable for their acts. Writing eloquently in dissent, Justice Scalia drew a sharp distinction between the severely mentally retarded (who are truly not responsible for their actions), and the merely stupid (the category into which Mr. Atkins undoubtedly fell). Scalia argued forcefully that, with respect to the merely stupid, at least sometimes they deserve to be punished for their antisocial and destructive behavior.

This article, of course, is not about capital punishment. It is a book review of Dirty, Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain. However, the above discussion is relevant because I initially had reservations about writing this book review at all. After all, it is clear to everyone who has read Meghan McCain’s twitter feed, her “articles” on The Daily Beast, or her ill-fated campaign blog that Meghan is not a paragon of clear reasoning, exemplar of familiarity with facts, nor a model of English language expertise. And after subjecting myself to 194 continuous pages of her “writing,” it became clear that none of the above-described works truly plumbed the depths of mental vacuity in which Ms. McCain aimlessly and cluelessly drifts.

Even as an AWCA, I find myself lost in admiration at such a vituperative work of art. Especially since it is so well-merited.