Victory.....

Yup

I've never been less excited about the President I voted for winning the election.

Mind you, I haven't voted for most winners.  Check it out my past votes:

2000 - Al Gore. (lost)  Dammit, Ben Franklin, propertyless college kids who are brainwashed by Lyndon B. Johnson's latter-day disciples shouldn't be handed Federal elections ballots.  It's like trying to get your dog drunk - sure the results may be funny, but is that really best for the dog or for the world we live in?

2004 - John Kerry. (lost) Wow.  Having graduated 'college' (liberal cadre mind-control sessions numbers 1 through 1,293) I became a ground level socialist-statist pro-plundocracy agitator who believed I was "on the right side of history."

2008 - Barak Hussein Obama. (won)  I include the Hussein because of findable evidence that the President harbors secret Muslim beliefs.  Yeah, I'm trotting that one out.  Anyway, still deep in my now self-re-enforcing liberal post-cognitive mind stew, I believed that I was - wait for it - on the right side of history.  Also, John McCain was too soft on child murder and claimed not to know how to run the economy.  Senator, you are a decent human being but not what the job description of running for President calls for.

And so for a good year and a half after Obama won I was pretty excited.  I figured it would be nifty.  I was leery about the Affordable Care Act, but I figured, hey, I'll take it, warts and all.  The economy will get better..... right?

Right?

Right?

(Michigan slogs through a one-state recession. Thanks, Jenny G.)

2012 - Willard Mitchell Samsonite Sasquatch Mittens Rutabegas-for-Breakfast He Fired Our Dads Willard Mitt Romney.  (lost)  (It's not just an Obama thing with the middle names.)  My political awakening will be detailed soon, but I can give you the concise version.  I owned property, had children, and had to keep a job in the private sector.  Democrats' policies don't favor you when that's your situation.

2016 - Donald J. Trump.  And here we find ourselves.

Is ISIS Worse Than Imperialism?

From my perspective it is very difficult to tell what ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - actually is.

Perhaps it is a type of infant nation-state, angrily half-stillborn across what was once a national border, both feared and hated.

Perhaps it is an outgrowth of terrorism, much like the Taliban fighters who came to dominate what had been the nation-state of Afghanistan.

Or perhaps it is something else, something my Western mind has a difficult time grasping.  I don't know Arabic, and sometimes, things seem to get lost in translation.

Little help comes from the media.  I learn occasionally what ISIS has done.  I am told that various military forces - the U.S. military, the Iraqi army, the forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad - are poised to destroy ISIS.  Maybe there's a great in-depth journalism piece out there that digs in and telling me about the origins, purpose, true state, and nature of ISIS, but I haven't seen it.

And despite military victories against it, ISIS isn't dead yet.  Indeed, it is now present in some form or another in 18 countries.  And since such reports tend to be a bit behind the times, it's likely in many more.

Reports today seem favorable.  Iraqi soldiers - after, apparently, performing poorly the past few years - although I no longer believe everything I read - have driving ISIS out of Nimrud, one of the world's most ancient cities.

ISIS, like al-Queda before it, destroys cultural artifacts that pre-date Islam in an attempt to erase history - one of its many disturbing policies.

I would not know how to subdue ISIS without becoming things that the Third World, the media, and liberals of all stripes hates the most - an imperialist or a dictator.

And yet British imperialists, centuries of occupying governments in Iraq, and even Saddam Hussein at least left artifacts and a country for ISIS, in ancient Nimrud and elsewhere, to destroy.

I genuinely believe that Americans - naive, ineffective, and ignorant of history as we were - went to Iraq to make it a better place.  The struggle fought by our armed service members there had meaning in and of itself.  They were led poorly, but fought well.  Yet to date, our efforts have not succeeded in bringing about a free, safe, and stable Iraq.  Rather Iraq has become a staging ground and lighthouse for global jihad.

Was Western imperialism actually the worst force that had ever been unleashed in Iraq?  A slightly deeper glance into Iraqi history seems to indicate that ISIS is merely the most recent in a long line of resistance to and violence against Western-occupying or 'Western-backed' governance.

Saddam was deeply evil, yet if you know of a better way to contain ISIS and prevent the spread of terrorism and chaos inside and outside of Iraq, chime in on comments below.  U.S. occupation did not work.  Maybe we did it wrong - maybe there were tactics and policies that would have worked.

Cynically, I am beginning to believe that certain countries should be left in their own private hells, if the reward for liberating them is being shot at.  And yet what do we do if that hell spawns global jihad?

Can we really sit back and do nothing?

And yet if ISIS is defeated, will Bashar al-Assad be the region's ruler?  Or, even if ISIS should be destroyed, will the region continue to be as it is now, a hodgepodge of fractured nation-states, terrorist groups, and rebels?

Somehow I don't think that answer is on Wikipedia.

If ISIS threatens Americans' lives, it must be opposed, violently, with military action.

Anything less simply invites more terror.

I am doubtful that we can successfully occupy Iraq over the long term without having to kill, seemingly, millions of Iraqis - a result no less unacceptable than Americans being killed.

And so we are limited to air strikes, special forces, and client armed forces, like the Iraqi army and the Kurds.

It is a broken and frustrating non-solution in a broken world, and yet there seems to be little better we can do.

Democrats Use Immigration Law to Seed New Voters For Themselves, Yet Republicans Go Along

In 1965, Ted Kennedy spearheaded a change to American immigration law.  Americans were promised that the fundamental nature of the U.S. population would not change.  51 years later, the United States is radically different, headed for a plurality amalgam with no one racial group being the majority.

Why even bother keeping track of people's race?  Why bother keeping track of national origins? Aren't all people from everywhere the same?

Toward the front of Harper's Magazine, I saw that hundreds of refugees had been placed in Eire, PA.  Checking the election results, I saw that the county had gone for Trump - but by the slimmest of margins.

There are those who accuse the Democrats of using immigration law to seed new voters for themselves.  As an American whose family has lived in America for many generations, and of old Irish stock, I wish that I could refute this.  Today, in the overwashing relief of a Trump victory, I do not dislike Democrats.  And there are deeper concerns:

From Imprimis:

It is now widely recognized that the Immigration Act of 1965 was intentionally designed to alter the racial and ethnic mix of the population of America. It has been an overwhelming success; demographers predict that by 2040 whites of European descent will no longer be a majority, having been displaced by people of Asian, African, Latin American, and Hispanic descent. For the most part—with the notable exception of Asians—these groups have supplied a significant clientele for the administrative state as it seeks to extend its reach and magnify its power. As such, it has redounded to the benefit of the Democratic Party—the party that favors the growth and extension of administrative state power. But make no mistake: illegal immigration has always had bipartisan support. Despite the fact that illegal immigration cuts against them politically, Republicans have always favored the cheap and exploitable labor of illegal aliens.

Both parties should change.

Music

Turning to his hostess, E. P. Peshkovaia, he declared his love for the "Appassionata" Sonata in the words cited above. However, though Soviet sources remained forever silent on the point, this is not all that he had to say. Gorky quotes Lenin further:

"But I cannot listen to music too often, it affects one's nerves, makes one want to say kind, stupid things and stroke the heads of those who, living in such a foul hell, can create such beauty. Nowadays if one strokes someone's head, he'll get his hand bitten off! Better to beat the person unmercifully over the head, although ideally we oppose the use of force in human relations. Hm, hm, our task is infernally hard!"

-from Lenin and Beethoven: Beyond the "Appassionata" Affair
By Frederick W. Skinner, 2003, The Beethoven Journal


Lenin was obviously nuts.  If you weren't anti-communist before reading that, you should be now.

Beautiful music should fuel this revolution, not derail it.  Sometimes I go too far, in my thoughts.  It is times like that when I listen to the theme from "To Kill a Mockingbird," and it calms me down very much.

Was the 2012 Election Won by Vote Fraud?

At 10:18 pm on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 I accurately predicted the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections, more than four hours ahead of the media.

Now, I am beginning to think that the difference between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump goes beyond the surface level details.  I'm beginning to think that Trump won because he in essence threatened a civil war over vote fraud.

It took me a titanic 23 minutes of online research to discover fairly hard evidence that Democrats have committed vote fraud.  And another three minutes to find out that Republicans have too.

Is Democratic vote fraud more systematic and pointed at winning Presidential elections?  Do groups of paid impersonators drive around from precinct to precinct on Election Day, voting as dead people?

I don't know.  But the thought is unsettling.

Nero and Vespasian

Both candidates were terrible.  They are like Roman emperors - one will burn our cities down through narcissistic negligence, the other will feed us to lions and dogs for sport.

I am glad Trump won, but American political culture should change.  This should never have been the choice.

Calling it - for Trump

10:19 PM, Tuesday, November 8th.  I am going to bed.  It is my prediction that Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

He won surprising numbers of votes in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Wisconsin, and, let me say, Michigan.

I am slightly surprised by his apparent loss in Pennsylvania.  Apparently I didn't know PA as well as I thought I did.

New Hampshire, Nevada, and a single Congressional district in Maine remain too close to call.  I will assume that Hillary Clinton wins all of them, bringing her Electoral College vote total to 265.

I predict that Donald Trump will win 273 Electoral College votes and the Presidency of the United States.

Whatever Happens, There is No Certain Rest

I've read so many conservative blog posts about individual responsibility that the words are beginning to lose meaning to me.  Sometimes I imagine there are large groups of people gathering a patchwork of fraudulent social security disability, food stamps, whatever is left of regular unemployment, small time drug sales (the small time drug sales should be legal, and untaxed for anyone making below $51,000 a year earned wages), and under the table work, and calling it life.

It's become such a dead horse to say that many people have lost a sense of individual responsibility that I feel tired of thinking it and saying it.

I can well imagine the challenges of being in Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Miami, or Los Angeles, and competing with a huge pool of workers for the same minimum or low wage jobs.  Say from $7.40 to $10.50 an hour, mostly part time jobs with minimal benefits or paid time off.

And it's not so much that those jobs don't pay well or that the benefits aren't great.  I mean, people can accept that.  It's that those kind of jobs are so rarely a window into a more prosperous economic sphere, that for the worker it can compound the sense of isolation that started with earning barely or not enough to live on.

To say nothing of if you have kids.

I feel, very, very strongly, that for all his failings, Donald Trump is the better candidate for what we now call 'the working poor.'  I don't think Donald Trump really knows it, and I can't credit him with anything like real compassion.  But by circumstances and being washing-machine wrung through a Republican primary process, he has been bonked closer to positions of what we call economic liberty.

I'm tired of wishing and hoping for a better life for people at the fringes.  I know - and I've repeated this to myself until the thought is just as threadbare as all these others - that people have to work hard, that even in the best circumstances we can create, there may still be injustice, and that in this life there is no certain rest.

Neither candidate can change the existential state of human nature.  And truly, neither really acknowledges a higher power beyond themselves, the one Power that really can.

And that might be the most sad of all.

The poetry was not very good in the years of his happiness

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” 

And there you have it.

Basic, researchable truths are now "hate speech"

Dear Mom,


     I remember the first day that you packed me off for Kindergarten, you said, "remember son, if sixteen years from now, fundamentalist Muslims attack the World Trade Center, and a Jewish lady criticizes them for following their religion, what she says will be considered and is, in fact, hate speech."  Wait, wait.... I don't remember that.  That's because you never said that.

From the Wikipedia article on freedom activist Pamela Geller:

She is a supporter of the English Defence League (EDL) saying: "I share the EDL's goals ... We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west."^[30] In June 2013, Geller was scheduled to speak at an EDL rally,^[7] but was barred from entering Britain by a Home Office ruling that describes her as having established "anti-Muslim hate groups".^[14] Cited as evidence for the ban were statements categorizing al-Qaeda as "a manifestation of devout Islam" and stating that jihad requires Jews as an enemy.^[31] Geller called the decision "a striking blow against freedom ... The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead." Hope not Hate, which led a campaign to ban her, applauded the decision stating "there is a line in the sand between freedom of speech and the right to use hate speech.".^[14]   


With love from your son,


Ben