Vladimir Putin: Leader of the Free World

"When you lead from behind, all you can see are asses, and you cannot see that you are the biggest ass of all"

Walter Russell Mead pins the blame for the Syrian crisis and its bloody, messy fallout directly where it belongs: On President Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry:

Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.

For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time.

The game is up. President Obama has been "caught out" as the British would say, running a potemkin campaign against ISIS.  If he really wanted to defeat ISIS, he would have cratered major highways connecting Raqqa to the outside world, bombed every oil tanker that moved, and crippled Raqqa's utilities infrastructure.

Obama attacks his most hated enemies...  Americans who disagree with him

Standing there with his proverbial pants down in Turkey, smoke still in the air from the terrorist attacks in France, that petulant, brittle and peevish little man who is our president unleashed his sarcastic anger on...

... not America's enemies, but his American enemies that include all Republicans and at least half of the nation's citizens.

No wonder the west is mired chaos with flames licking at our feet. President Obama and his firebug partner Hillary lit the fuse.

Vladimir Putin Leader of the Free World

Lead from behind = Left behind...

"Russian President Vladimir Putin is now the leader of the Free World against Islamist terrorism, directing the efforts of France and Germany and setting terms for American involvement. Reeling from last week’s massacre in Paris, France lacks both the backbone and the brute force to avenge itself against ISIS, but in alliance with Russia it will make a more than symbolic contribution." (Asia Times)

Dems are Worried...  about themselves...

Stu Rothenberg at Roll Call worries all of these world events will hurt Democrats, while Hillary Clinton has been fingered as the Democrat's Dick Cheney.

President Obama and his band of merry mischief makers have now sown more chaos, spawned more humanitarian crises, and lit more fires than the Bushites,  and Democrats up for reelection next year are escaping the party plantation.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.   ~ Buddha

Terrorism?

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - A gunman stormed a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Colorado Springs on Friday and opened fire with a rifle in an attack that left three people dead and nine others injured, authorities said. (Yahoo News-Reuters)

We don't know the gunman's motives, but let's assume he hated abortion for the abomination that it is, and that his hatred of this evil sprang from his Christianity, and from there he was motived to go to an abortion clinic, and in violation of Thou Shalt Not Murder, start shooting people.

Is this terrorism?

Is Christianity to blame?

What makes this different from Islamic violence?

Do protesters have blood on their hands?

Police declined to discuss the gunman's motivations. But the president of the Rocky Mountains chapter of Planned Parenthood, Vicki Cowart, suggested a climate of rancor surrounding abortion in the United States sets the stage for such violence.

The Colorado Springs clinic has been the target of repeated protests by anti-abortion activists, and in recent years moved to new quarters on the city's northwest side - a facility derided as a "fortress" by critics of Planned Parenthood.

People from my church (among many others) protest at that clinic every Saturday. They protest peacefully, they do not attempt to block the entrance, they do not hinder people coming in and out, they don't scream at them, in fact, they do not even address the customers because they do not in any way want to appear threatening or intimidating. I know the priest that conducts regular masses in front of Planned Parenthood. Father Bill Carmody is a local media personality for his outspoken opposition to abortion.

Is Father Bill to blame for this?

Do the protesters (which sometimes include my wife) share the blame for this?

What additional circumstances or factors would lessen or increase the culpability of anti-abortion protesters and the Christian churches they attend?

Every Morning - J Mascis

Laughter Makes for a Good Appetite

I don't know about you, but I'm smoking a turkey tomorrow, and then I'll be participating in a pie eating contest.

Here are some corny, stale Thanksgiving riddles I stole off the internet...

What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?

Pumpkin pi


Why do turkeys go gobble, gobble?
Because they never learned their table manners!


What do you get when you cross a turkey with a banjo?
A turkey that can pluck itself! (this one doesn't even make sense, but it had a banjo in it, so I kept it)

And the mustiest, crustiest, oldest and corniest one of all...

Why was the United Nations concerned when the waitress dropped the platter on Thanksgiving?
It meant the fall of Turkey, the ruin of Greece, and the break up of China.

Goodbye Woodrow Wilson?

At Princeton, the Black Justice League takes on an iconic figure of the Democratic Party, an unapologetic progressive, and an avowed racist.

Culminating a yearlong campaign to purge Princeton of Wilson the BJL staged a 32 hr sit-in in the office of the president, and the president of Princeton capitulated.

Was Woodrow Wilson a racist? Undoubtedly! He was even considered a racist by the standards of his own time.  The question therefore becomes is his racism the total sum of his being and accomplishments?  

While he was a racist by the standards of his own times, it was also not uncommon by the standards of his own time.  He reversed policies established through reconstruction effectively resegregating the federal government.

He also led the country in WWI, was instrumental in the founding of the League of Nations, supported suffrage, granted citizenship to Puerto Ricans, and laid the groundwork for the subsequent New Deal.  

Do we judge figures from the past with the morals of the present?  Should Wilson be erased from Princeton?  Should the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs be renamed? What do you say?

Intolerant Ultra-Conservatives are a Danger to Western Culture

Liberal democracy is the foundation of western societies--yes the United States is a republic--but we in the western world are liberal democrats.

Our liberal democracy nourishes a diverse political and social biosphere where you can pretty much say and do whatever the hell you damn well please. Our laws provide pretty wide latitude, and I think libs and cons agree we wouldn't want it any other way.

No Anarchy, No Tyranny

We certainly wouldn't want it to tip over into anarchy, which is the extreme end of liberalism.  There are very few small government types who are fans of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism, and very few liberals I know want a no-holds-barred, anything goes culture.

We don't swing hard to the reactionary side either.  Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and a whole host of fundamentalist Christians would like to use the power of the federal government to rein in and roll back a lot of what is going on, but they don't get much traction because there just ain't that many people who agree with them, even among God-fearing Christians who take their faith seriously.

Who are the West's Most Vociferous Conservatives?

Muslims by and large are conservative people and they don't enjoy having their sensibilities offended or their religion mocked. Coming from a culture that respects that, and then moving to the wild, wild west is a shock, causing some to nurse hatred and eventually lash out in violence, but those are a significant but small number of cases, so lets leave that aside for now.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Can't good, honest liberals see that even the most benign, non-violent pushback from ultra-conservative newcomers nibbles away at our liberty?

Speech codes, accommodations that demand others change how they act and speak, requiring others to tamp down their own religiosity and symbols because they offend, making German butchers take down decorative pigs from their storefronts, etc...  And then liberal nations like France push back against this extreme religiosity with illiberal laws like a hijab ban.

As a society, we here in the US and Europe have already hashed all this out over the centuries and we have reached a fairly stable societal consensus evidenced by the paucity of rioting and violence over such things.

Now come the Muslims...

... and we're having to hash through all this again. I am not attacking Muslims. Other religions have extremists, and get enough of them together in one place, they will agitate much the same, but right here, right now, we are dealing with Muslims, and granted, its a small but noisy sliver.

I don't blame them for being offended, and the vast majority who express their displeasure peacefully are not bad people.

Simply put, many are intolerant of our extreme liberties.  Chafed and inflamed by a nonstop stream of blasphemies and moral libertinism, they agitate those around them as they register their displeasure. That combination of extreme conservatism and noisy intolerance can never be at peace with loose western values and morals. Outside a few isolated cases, Christianity has made that uneasy peace (losing millions through defections in the process), but too many Muslims seem incapable of doing so.

Do we really want to threaten our liberal democracy by bringing in people who, because of their upbringing, see our societal achievement as not only a threat to them personally and a gross blasphemous insult to their faith, but as a very real evil that must be reformed or destroyed?

The Mountaintop

Photo: Bob Jagendorf

Can a white man play Martin Luther King?

There has been some controversy surrounding an Ohio University production of Katori Hall's play The Mountaintop and Michael Oatman's casting of a white actor in the role of MLK, actually he dual cast the role using both a black and a white actor.

The play is set in its entirety in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel on the last day in the life of Martin Luther King.

The playwright called the decision "disrespectful".

Katori Hall's reaction. 

The Washington Post asked "As actors of color increasingly play traditionally white roles, breaking Broadway’s color barriers, should the opposite be true as well? Should a white man be allowed to play a black historical figure as important as Martin Luther King?" 

This comes on the heels Lin-Manual Miranda's successful play Hamilton and it's black and Hispanic cast of America's founding fathers. NYT Review

Is one acceptable and the other not?  Are there limits and should there be limits on the casting of roles based on race?  

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subsequent to my writing this post a performance of Jesus in India has been cancelled after demands by the playwright citing the "ethnic composition of the cast", the cast is white.  The playwright demanded that the university recast the play using an Asian cast, unfortunately Clarion University doesn't have a large Asian student population (less than 1% of the student population), and no Asians auditioned for the play.  The playwright, Lloyd Suh a Korean-American, said that "Clarion was distorting and disrespecting his work and, in doing so, perpetuating hostility against nonwhite performers."

The school had paid Lloyd Suh $500 for the rights to put on the play, a sum that will be refunded, but the school is also out $15,000 in pre-production costs. I certainly hope that the university will sue to recoup those costs, but I doubt it.

Imagine the reaction if a white playwright revoked performance rights for a mixed-race cast claiming that the play was written for white people. 

Little Snowflakes

Given yesterdays post, I thought this would be entertaining enlightening.

Maoist Daughter Kills Liberal Mother

Kill that Imperialist Running Dog!

We are witnessing the murder of liberalism on College Campuses

A sensitive, liberal, female guidance counselor at Yale wrote a fluffy e-mail about halloween costumes to the students, and it threw the hard-left activists into a flaming rage. One latte leftist from a comfy upper-middle class upbringing screamed vulgarities at the woman's husband.

Students at Mizzou are up in arms over peckerwoods in pickups shouting racial slurs, turd swastikas in transgender-friendly bathrooms, and the usual list of microagressions and refusals of whities to check their privilege.

Chairman Mao's Makeover

Political Vel Craft

The Missouri students demanded, among other things, that the University President write an apology and read it publicly.  That is right out of Mao's China.

A good professor who grew up in the 60's would perhaps suggest these students read and discuss Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," but it would probably go right over their heads.




This is not Liberalism

This is the death of liberalism, and this conservative is alarmed by it.  Liberal academics are on the run on college campuses, chased by a hard-left rabble that shuts down free speech and demands the purging and cleansing of inconvenient truths from course content.

This is what happens when the adults abdicate authority, give up their roles as adults and try to be down with the struggle.  It doesn't earn them cred with the peeps; it earns them well-deserved scorn, and it encourages the libertine rabble.

Can the true liberals stand up and call BS on this?

I don't expect them to shut it down, that would be illiberal, but can they at least stand up for free speech for all?  Including inconvenient speech, controversial speech and uncomfortable speech?  Can they dust off the best and highest ideals from their 1960's youth and offer them to a new generation? Can liberals find their voice and stand up for their liberal values?

Can conservatives stand with the liberals on this one?

If we lose liberalism to this hard-leftism, we all lose.  Can conservatives stand with the liberals? Can we do it without the crap-slinging and name-calling?  Can we realize that we need one another? These fringe lefties are even more dangerous than the fringe righties because they have the momentum on their side and they understand how to tap into public sympathy and goodwill.

I often denigrate Jesse Jackson, but he is right:  It takes two wings to fly. Our nation needs a healthy, intellectually vibrant liberalism and conservatism, but when college campuses shovel us Ultimate Ironies like a Journalism professor calling for "some muscle over here," to defenestrate a student journalist, we get neither.

Conservative writers, speakers and thinkers are personae non grata on campuses, as are liberal, politically-incorrect comedians who despise conservatism.

So, what does that leave us with?

Education, or Indoctrination?

Free College: You get what you pay for...

American Digest

(Reuters) - Students held rallies on college campuses across the United States on Thursday to protest ballooning student loan debt for higher education and rally for tuition-free public colleges... (Reuters)

Free College?  Sure, given the following conditions:

$  "Free" pays for books, and a building with teachers inside.

You want the pampered, gold-plated experience complete with meditation gardens and sushi bars? Great! But you'll have to pay for those upgrades on your own.  The taxpayer only pays for the classroom part of your experience.

$ The European Model

If we adopted the European model, college would be much cheaper. See here, and here.

In most of the rest of the world, only the largest and most prestigious universities have an actual campus.  A typical good quality university in any Latin American capital looks more like a high school.  Most colleges in Europe hold classes in buildings around the city.  No Dorms, no athletics, no frat parties. Just a solid, no-nonsense learning experience.

$ Same Standard for Academics as for Athletics

Gaining a spot on a college sports team is tough.  The Athletic Department tests you in tryouts, and if you don't meet the standard, you're out.  Applying for a college degree program should work the same way.

No wasting other students' time and taxpayer money. Standardized tests to classify into a degree program. No free-form essays on your feelings, no 'resumes' of your young unaccomplished life. Real exams with real right and wrong answers that test your aptitude for your course of study.

$ It shouldn't be completely free 

Students need to have skin in the game.  I was going to expound on this idea here, but what I wrote sounded pretty much like what we have now.  Too many students are diving in to expensive programs with unrealistic expectations.  Adults are encouraging this, and they need to stop it.

If your goal is to be a social worker, a degree from Harvard doesn't get you anything more than a degree from your local city college, other than a much bigger student loan debt.

$ Extra Credit

Here are some other ideas...

* Extra financial incentives for earning a degree our American economy (or your state's economy) needs.

* Eight semesters and out.  No professional students.  You get eight taxpayer funded semesters, and that's it.  For degree programs requiring more that 120 hours, you can gain the extra support by demonstrated diligence and academic excellence.

* Stop stigmatizing the skilled trades.  We need butchers, bakers, hairdressers, welders, construction workers, mechanics and other skilled occupations that require in-depth training and knowledge but not necessarily a university degree.

* Cut the crap.  Instead of arguing over "Useless College Degrees," set a quota for broad areas of study based upon economic need.  This would mean few slots for government-funded pre-law or political science.

* Get Real.  Some bachelors degrees, such as fine arts, history, sociology, psychology and liberal arts prepare the graduate for a job at Starbucks, a bookstore or a part-time substitute teacher.  But, these degrees are also an important foundation for a Masters and PhD in various fields of study.  High School and college counselors need to make sure students understand this.

We need to have this discussion, but we also need to understand that "free education" is not an end unto itself.  Italy spills over with Doctors of History working as low-wage tour guides, and I have sat in many a South American cafe or wineshop listening to fiery rhetoric spilling forth from a bearded Marxist with a PhD in Philosophy... and no job.  The few who did have a job had to interrupt their diatribe every so often to serve me and the other customers another drink.

Maturity Deficit on Americas College Campuses

According to The Washington Post, “several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.” These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film-editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can’t bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings? (Conor Friedersdorf)

This is what happens when conservatives cede ground to even the most well-meaning liberals. Liberal adults (and I do mean that charitably, in its most genuine meaning) on college campuses all over America are now under assault from leftwing progressive adolescents. The inmates are taking over the asylum.

We are literally at the point where students can scream vulgarities into the faces of faculty members and not only get by with it, but bask in plaudits for their stream of sewage.

"Another Silliman resident declared in a campus publication, “I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.”

One feels for these students. But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain." (Conor Friedersdorf)

Friedersdorf illuminates a critical point lost in all the noise:

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”  (Conor Friedersdorf)

Yes. Adolescents and young adults are drama queens. Their frontal lobes are not completely developed, and even highly-intelligent people in their early 20's can display poor risk-reward calculations, hyper-emotionalism and impulsive behavior.

Adults in positions of authority in places like college campuses used to have stuffy rules in place that took this into account and they attempted to sluice ebullient adolescent behavior into positive and productive activities. Now... not so much...

So, where does it get us to coddle these youngsters and enable their immature world view and narcissistic self-righteousness?

Read this fluffy duck e-mail from a Yale guidance counselor. Note the apologetic tone and the tiptoeing through modern-day tulips of triggerwarnings, microaggrestions, feelings-validation and cultural sensitivity.

The response?  Inflamed students are screaming for the sensitive, liberal, female writer of that e-mail to be fired from Yale along with her husband.

That's where coddling youngsters and pandering to their bathos gets us...

We Are NOT A Dictatorship

The US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Obama's executive amnesty and uses his own words to do it:

“But what you are not paying attention to is the fact that I just took an action to change the law,”

Apparently someone was paying attention.

Hillary Clinton called it:

 "a politically motivated lawsuit against the president's actions" 

Well... DUH?

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Josh Earnest accused Republicans of standing in the way of changing immigration law.  Well Josh, that's what minority means... it means you can't dictate changes to the law with only 46% of the votes necessary to pass legislation, it's called democracy.

The Department of Injustice has announced that it will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. 

WE ARE AT WAR

We are at war whether we like it or not.  You can voice trite platitudes about Islam being the religion of peace, but there remains a significant Islamist movement that belies that statement that will strike anyone, anywhere, anyplace, at any time to further their agenda.  They don't limit their attacks to the West, just days before the Paris massacre they killed 43 people outside a Shia mosque in Beirut prompting Hezbollah to claim:

"They targeted civilians, worshipers, unarmed people, women and elderly, they only targeted innocent people...[it was a] satanic, terrorist attack."

 ISIS responded with:

"Let the Shiite apostates know that we will not rest until we take revenge in the name of the prophet."  "After the apostates gathered in the area, one of the knights of martyrdom detonated his explosive belt in the midst of them."

No one is safe, Muslim or not.

Despite what some of our liberal followers may claim no one is advocating war with Islam.  We are not so naive to think that every Muslim is an enemy but we do recognize our inability to tell the good from the bad.  If Opus Dei suicide bombers were massacring people in Italian markets and gunning down worshipers in Protestant churches my response would be the same; they must be destroyed root and branch.

In World War II there were plenty of good and peaceful Germans caught up in the Nazi atrocities of the age who had no choice other than death if they refused to support the state or join the Wehrmacht. The people in areas controlled by ISIS are in the same position, we could not limit our response then, we cannot limit our response now.  One cannot sit on the sidelines of this war between civilization and absolute barbarity.

We cannot cede territory to ISIS and what they do control must be destroyed without regard to collateral damage.  Any town, village, or hut flying the ISIS flag is a legitimate military target. 

President Obama claims that 99.9% of Muslims don't support fundamentalist radicalism, but it doesn't matter.  If the number of radicals is .1 or 1 or 10, or even 50, whatever the remainder they cannot sit on the sidelines and claim it is not their problem.  We all have a problem with radical Islam, we are all targets or will be, we must all fight our common enemy.


It's not just Je Suis Charlie anymore or even
Je Suis Une Cible


Nous sommes tous des cibles

We are all targets

Bonus Track

The American Band Eagles of Death Metal were on stage at the Bataclan theater when cowardly Muslims burst in killing over 100 concert goers.  Surprisingly, they're not a Death Metal band. Hopefully, they all got out alive.

BREAKING NEWS!!!

 REPORTS  
140 158 160 120 127+ DEAD IN PARIS

COME TOMMOROW 

RAQQA OUGHT TO LOOK LIKE THIS

I for one am tired of politically correct platitudes, we may not be at war with Islam but we ought to be, they are at war with us.

War is cruelty. 

There is no use trying to reform it. 

The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, I say let us give them all they want.

William Tecumseh Sherman

“O crusaders we are coming to you with 

bombs and rifles,  Wait for us.” 

 ISIS Tweet

I SAY, 

Don't bother, we'll come to you... 

and if you want to meet Allah, 

We'll be happy to arrange the meeting.

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. 

STAND, MEN OF THE WEST!
Vive la République et Vive la France 

Dance

He Kept us Safe...

We're electing a new president next year, and I am concerned that our standards are slipping...

Yeah, Bush kept us safe...

... After 3,000 people were murdered on 9/11... and after he constructed a hideous monstrosity of Big Brother domestic surveillance manned by brigades of union-protected rubber-gloved gropers who have yet to uncover one plot against a commercial airliner.  Homeland Security is looking to branch out to every corner of society, while government SWAT teams and high tech snoopers aim their fearsome power at We The People

AOW questioned my excoriation of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in a recent blog thread, and I promised I would give her an answer. (I also promise that I think this is my last post gratuitously beating up on George W. Bush.  It doesn't give me pleasure to do so.)

Here is her comment:

SF,
No way did GWB expect such a thing to happen while on his watch.

Condoleeza Rice was certainly no expert on the Middle East. I can't imagine that she was prepared for what suddenly faced her. Who back then understood the Sunni-Shia balance in the Middle East -- and the part that Saddam Hussein played in that balance?

Hindsight is 20/20. But at the time? It seems to me that most were on board with what the Bush administration did -- especially during his first term in office.

My answer:

Hindsight is indeed often 20/20, but that's not good enough for the president and national security advisors.  They need 20/20 foresight, or something close to it.

All kinds of educated people and Middle East experts were ringing all kinds of alarm bells as Bush marched us to war.  To give Bush credit, unlike Obama, he did everything right.  He spent over a year laying out his case, and he got congressional and UN approval.

I don't know what Bush's motives were, but there was no historical basis for the optimistic sunshine they blew up our asses, that people would welcome us by throwing rose petals in our path, Iraq would become Germany on the Euphrates...

Either Bush's gravitas-filled wise old men were tragically ignorant, or they scammed us.  And the Sunni-Shia balance was well-understood by State Department and DoD types.

I come down hard on Bush for the same reasons I now rake Hillary over the coals:  They committed tragic and horrible deeds in our name.  The Muslim world and our own nation are worse off because of their actions.  Ironically, already-besieged Christians and other religious minorities have paid the highest price for our foreign policy sins, in rapes, church burnings, mass displacement, ethnic cleansing and murder.

We need to demand more of our leaders, and we need to rip off our partisan blinders.  You pull what Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Obama, Hillary and the rest of the gang did, and you should be a pariah in your own nation for the rest of your born days.

The price of tolerating such government actions is that we (and the world) will suffer through even more of them.  If we can't call out the fraudsters, bumblers, crooks, idiots, serial-abusers, loose cannons and wrecking-balls on our own side, we are through as a nation.

Veteran's Day

For God and the soldier we adore, 

In time of danger, not before!
The danger passed, and all things righted, 

God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.”

Attributed to Rudyard Kipling, although probably far older - also attributed to Francis Quarles (1592-1644), used in a speech by John F Kennedy Nov 26, 1962.

Here's to the Blue of the wind-swept North
When we meet on the fields of France,
May the spirit of Grant be with you all
As the sons of the North advance!
 

 Here's to the Gray of the sun-kissed South
When we meet on the fields of France,
May the spirit of Lee be with you all
As the sons of the South advance!
 

 And here's to the Blue and the Gray as One!
When we meet on the fields of France,
May the spirit of God be with us all
As the sons of the Flag advance!  

George Morrow Mayo

Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate:
 "To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. 
And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, 
For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods

Thomas Babbington Macauley

I KNOW that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

 W.B. Yeats

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Robert Laurence Binyon

I bid you stand, Men of the West

Uh, NEVERMIND!

“Rates of military sexual trauma among men who served in the military may be as much as 15 times higher than has been previously reported, largely because of barriers associated with stigma, beliefs in myths about male rape, and feelings of helplessness,”

November 2nd, American Psychological Association

Retracted due due to flawed data analysis.

“Although the article went through our standard peer-review process, other scholars have since examined the data and raised valid concerns regarding the design and statistical analysis, which compromise the findings,”

 November 8th, American Psychological Association

A Rand spokesman confirmed Monday that its researchers told the APA that its published study methodology was flawed.

To extrapolate the APA article, it would mean as many as 180,000 military men were sexually assaulted, and of those, 57,750 were raped in one year.

Apparently as a soft science, math is not a prerequisite for Psychologists.

Washington Times

APA

Speaker Ryan Cleans House

OK, he didn't exactly clean house, but he did get a big bipartisan Highway bill passed. He used the bill to Trojan Horse the crony crapitalist Ex-Im bank, but we can't have it all...

We need a highway bill. Our infrastructure is falling apart and we have illegal aliens who need the work. What worries me is that this is a gigantic political corruption honey pot spilling over with generous opportunities for crony crapitalist fraud, waste and abuse.

Uncle Stupid flushed $780,000,000 of taxpayer money down the toilet when politically-connected Green Goblins absconded with the loot and left bankrupt corporations behind, so we have a right to be skeptical.

Remember the "Stimulus?"

...and all that blather about "shovel ready jobs?"

Phillip K. Howard at HuffPo totes up what that $900 billion got us, beside the dubious claim of 6 million jobs "saved," whatever that means...

Despite all the happy talk, how much of the stimulus went to infrastructure?

$30 billion. That's a little more than 3 percent of the total stimulus plan. 

Where did the rest of the stimulus money go?

About $500 billion went to tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and "state fiscal relief" (shoring up insolvent state budgets).

The remaining $300 billion was spent on actual projects, of which the big beneficiaries were:

(i) subsidies for clean energy ($78 billion),
(ii) subsidies for education and child support ($50 billion)(student loans, special ed, and support for disadvantaged children),
(iii) health and health IT ($32 billion),
(iv) transportation infrastructure ($30 billion, as noted above);
(v) environmental cleanup ($28 billion),
(vi) new buildings ($24 billion),
(vii) scientific research ($18 billion), and a few other categories. (HuffPo)

So the government employee syndicates and the politically-connected cleaned up at our expense.

The post-WWII GI Bill produced an entire generation of engineers, doctors and business entrepreneurs that powered US dominance of the global economy. During the Depression, people celebrated and sang songs about the Dams, engineering marvels and other grand projects federal funds bankrolled and hard-working Americans constructed.  Great stately monuments from that era stand even today, with brass plaques affixed to them trumpeting the achievement.

What do we have to show for the $900 billion?

I don't think even Bruce Springsteen or Eddie Vedder sang any songs about Obama's stimulus and all the clean energy we're enjoying as a result...

So, kudos to congress for passing a much-needed infrastructure bill, but Semper Vigilans, caveat emptor, sic tyrannosaurus rexus, et al...

Hillary's Army has Europe All Merkeled Up

These are the kinds of stupidities one-world phantasists in Europe are spouting in the midst of the European migrant crisis caused by Hillary and Barack's North African adventures:

"Should the chancellor regain control of the situation it remains possible that in 20 years’ time, she could yet be seen as the mother of a different, more vibrant and multicultural Germany — a country that held on to its values when it was put to the test." (Financial Times)

"More vibrant and multiculural Germany?" Hard to believe, but people people exist who actually believe such twaddle. And no, they can't explain how shattering a homogeneous culture and making it "multi" makes it better...

While Germany's gates have been smashed off their hinges, Eastern Europeans are building fences and slamming doors. They remember what it was like living close to the bone, so, unlike their prosperity-fattened and welfare-stupified cousins to the West, they still cling to some common sense.

Meanwhile, Germany is all Merkeled up...

"The chancellor has tried to live up to the best traditions of postwar Germany, including respect for human-rights and a determination to abide by international legal obligations."

"The trouble is that Ms Merkel’s government has clearly lost control of the situation."

No shit. Inviting in a million people from an incompatible culture can do that...

"But there is panic just beneath the surface: costs are mounting, social services are creaking, Ms Merkel’s poll ratings are falling and far-right violence is on the rise. Der Spiegel, a news magazine, wrote this week that: “Germany these days is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about expressing their hatred and xenophobia.”"

Hatred:  You keep using that word...

Killing people, attacking them and burning them out of their shelters is hatred. It is not hatred to stand up and say you don't want unassimilable people in your country. Protesting government is a fundamental right of the people.

It is not xenophobic to defend your borders, language and culture...

It is fundamental self-preservation. The scribes in the press who continually scream otherwise are batwinged gargoyles in service to the global elite.

Here's more:

"As the placid surface of German society is disturbed, so arguments about the positive economic and demographic impact of immigration are losing their impact."

What positive impacts?

Can anyone provide one example where Muslims gained a working plurality or majority in a previous non-muslim society or region and improved it? Lebanon, anyone?

If this were an invasion of dentists and plumbers and their families, we could discuss the relative merits, but let's face it, this is mostly military-age young men raised on the supremacy of one book over all others, and they are marinated in a culture of religious bigotry where killing blasphemers is a mark of honor.

Can anyone point to any real-world examples of where vast numbers of Muslims have quietly assimilated into a Christian or secular society?

This debate is important for a few reasons:

First, it decides who holds the power in Europe and its nations: Bureaucrats, or the people. Bureaucrats cowing their EU subjects into submission by hurling slanderous charges of rightwing extremism, xenophobia and racism isn't working anymore. Hopefully, Germans and other Europeans will stand up and smash that garbabage back in the faces of the continental elite.

This also has global implications. Can we call a spade a spade? Can we point to Mexico and say its a beautiful country with fine people, but they need to get their shit together? Can we point out that Lebanon, only 50 years ago an oasis of modernity, sanity and secular tranquility, has been wrecked as Muslims moved in and gained a majority? Can we point out what a stinking pile of shit the Muslim world is?

Can we declare, Hell Yes, our culture is better than theirs. Can we state emphatically that we want to preserve our culture from those who have destroyed theirs?

The Wonders of Bach

Offenbach, that is.

And see if you can figure out the common American tune that this Gendarmes' Duet was the basis for:

And you thought classical music was dry, dusty, stodgy, and prudish ;)  Happy Friday!

He's Black?

A Hate Crime investigation was launched following a string of seven church fires in the St. Louis area in which the congregations were predominately black.  Police have charged David Lopez Jackson in 2 of the seven fires and he remains a suspect in the other five.

Liberals left baffled and confused! 

An ATF spokesman was quoted as saying "There appears to be no indication of a hate crime or sign ... any one particular Christian denomination or ethnic group was being targeted, to be honest I'm completely stumped! I don't know what to think." 

One local leader said he was relieved that he was caught and now that he knew he was black, hopefully he would get some help, but you know... we were kind of hoping we were going to get to string up a honkey! As he walked off he was heard yelling at the top of his lungs:

"NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE". 

Seriously though folks, isn't it kind of racist jumping to the conclusion that the Perp was some angry white guy? Sometimes an arsonist is just an arsonist.

Although to give our liberal friends some hope, maybe it was a hate crime, maybe he hates religion and churches were the only thing conveniently at hand.  Oh wait, that would make him eligible for a leadership position in the DNC. 

The Liberal Mind

Kim Davis has to issue marriage licenses to gay people but Muslim truck drivers don't have to deliver beer.

The Equal Unemployment Opportunities Commission filed on behalf of two Somali men who were fired from a trucking company after refusing to deliver beer saying it was against their religious values as practicing Muslims.  The two men were awarded $240,000 after it was found that the company violated their religious beliefs.  The EEOC attorney released a statement:

"This is an awesome outcome... They suffered real injustice that needed to be addressed."

An even more awesome outcome is that Star Transport has shuttered operations as a result putting 25 people in Morton, Illinois out of work. Central Illinois News

I wonder what would have happened if the two men were Catholic and refused to deliver condoms to a Planned Parenthood Clinic.  Do you think perhaps the outcome might have been different? 

Jewish drivers refusing to deliver bacon to their neighborhood supermarkets?

Hindu's who refuse to deliver beef?

Secular cab drivers who refuse to take people to church, mosque, or synagogue?  

Would you be okay with a Muslim cab driver refusing to take you to a bar?

How much bullshit do we need to accommodate? 

Brave New Totalitarianism

Robert Kaplan has written a brilliant article that takes stock of the 20th century, observes where we are now, and extrapolates into the future, and it ain't pretty. He envisions new strains of totalitarianism.

 Kaplan is a student of the world, and he has traveled extensively in the lands he writes about. As for his prognostication skills, go read his 1994 essay, The Coming Anarchy.  In early 2001 he published a book of the same name to further developed this thesis... Just in time for 9/11.

I urge you to read the essay and then comment. If you don't like Kaplan because of some twisted ideological bent you have, shut up and go away. I don't want to hear it.  Below I excerpt some salient points from the essay...

What is our biggest fear?

"It is the threat of a utopian ideology in the hands of a formidable power. Because utopia is, in and of itself, the perfect political and spiritual arrangement, any measures to bring it about are morally justified, including totalitarianism and mass murder.

[...]

"Its primary attraction lies in what it does to the soul, and understanding that makes clear just how prone our own age is to a revival of utopian totalitarianism."

Society suffers...

"The entire illness stemmed from that need, that hunger for something all-embracing.” The problem was “too much of everything. Too many people, too many ideas, too many books, too many systems.” Who could cope?"

People long for a "simple catechism," now more than ever, as faith in God, man, institutions, and governments plummet.

"Freedom" leads to "the horror of Chaos"...

"For the 20th century was about bigness [...] But the 21st century is about smallness: the erosion of state power by postindustrial cyber and informational tools, tools that put power into the hands of stateless groups and lessen the domination of states. Thus, the horror of chaos has replaced the horror of totalitarianism."

Hollow Souls

"The soul itself, explains the contemporary Romanian philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici, is being hollowed out because of the substitution of the inner imagination by technology: smartphones, intelligent toys, the array of electronics at malls. Technology, as Martin Heidegger understood, is devoid of intrinsic purpose, with mental anguish and confusion merely the result of its overuse. Thus, we desperately require meaning in our lives, which conventional politics obviously cannot satisfy"

Totalitarianism: “suicidal escape from this reality”

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination . . . is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.”

"People everywhere—in the West, in the Middle East, in Russia, in China—desperately need something to believe in, if only to alleviate their mental condition. They are dangerously ready for a new catechism..."

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg won't save You

"The jet-age elites are of little help in translating or alleviating any of this. Cosmopolitan, increasingly denationalized, ever less bound to territory or parochial affinities [...] They can analyze everything while they believe in nothing, and have increasingly less loyalty to the countries whose passports they hold.

This deracination renders them wholly disconnected from the so-called unwashed masses, whose upheavals and yearnings for a new totality, a new catechism, in order to fill the emptiness and loneliness in their souls, regularly surprise and shock them."

His Conclusion:

"Globalization, as it intensifies, carries the potential to unleash utopian ideologies by diluting concrete, traditional bonds to territory and ethnicity, for in the partial void will come a heightened appeal to more abstract ideals, the very weapons of utopia."

What is your conclusion?

Mmm... Bacon

Who doesn't love Bacon?  The World Health Organization apparently because their latest pronouncement is that it is as bad for you as cigarettes.  The WHO has moved bacon into the category of Class I Carcinogens along with tobacco smoke, diesel soot, asbestos, plutonium, and arsenic.  REALLY?

Bacon causes an increase in the risk of bowel cancer by a sixth. Eat just two ounces of cured pork a day and you are headed for an early grave. Except you're not. What the reports authors failed to stress was the difference between relative and absolute risks.

'In the normal run of things, around six in every 100 people would be expected to get bowel cancer in their lifetime. 'If all these 100 people ate a three-rasher - around 50g - bacon sandwich every single day of their lives, then according to this report we would expect that 18% more would get bowel cancer – which is a rise from 6 cases to 7 cases. 'So that's one extra case of bowel cancer in all those 100 lifetime bacon-eaters.'  Daily Mail

 Bacon is carcinogenic, but so is the air you breathe.  Newsweek

Two important things to consider:

1. From bourbon to bacon the key to a healthy life is moderation.

2. Life is terminal.

Enjoy life, and remember bacon kills far more many pigs than people ;)

Bread of the Dead

Combine 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon crushed anise seed and 2 packets (1/2 oz) yeast in a bowl.  Heat half a cup of milk and half a cup of water with 8 teaspoons butter until the butter is just melted (do not boil; you don't want the liquid hot enough to kill the yeast).  Whisk the liquid into the bowl and add four large eggs. Mix in 1 1/2 cup of flour then slowly knead in 3 more cups. Allow to rise.

I just add all the ingredients to my breadmaker and use it to knead and rise the dough (do not cook it in the breadmaker).


Divide the dough ball in half, from each half make 2 small dough balls of roughly an ounce or two each.  Mold each remaining large half into a round loaf and using the remaining balls of dough to form a crossbones shape on top.

Place on a parchment lined baking sheet and set aside for another hour to hour and half to rise again.  

Heat oven to 350

Brush the loaves with an egg yolk glaze (1 yolk beaten with a little water) and put in the middle of the oven.  After about twenty minutes remove from oven, brush again with the egg glaze and sprinkle with sugar or a mixture of sugar and cinnamon.  Put back in the oven and bake until golden brown and hollow sounding when tapped (about another 20-30 minutes).

And there you have it, Pan de Muertos or Bread of the Dead.