The Internet Has Failed Us

The Internet was billed as a way of bringing people together.  It was billed as creating a level playing field, a place beyond the constraints of editorial limitations, a place where people could have real freedom to express themselves.  The problem is that most content people put out is terrible and would better not have seen the light of day.

Lest you think me too harsh, witness this: many major news sites- folks as varied as the milquetoast 'conservatives' at National Review Online are from the hard- core Bolsheviks orchestrating the propaganda machine at NPR - do share one thing in common - they've shut down comments on their websites.  Yes, comments, where 2002's thoughtful if slightly longwinded inveighences from the effete intelligentsia had morphed into 2016's profanity-laden tirades by the millions of angry unemployed dudes of all political stripes.

Even sites dedicated to commenting - and I'm looking at you, Twitter - merely add jet fuel to the fire of comments about comments that becomes a form of anti-information, replacing what little we knew with a vapid stream of consciousness that benefits nobody.

Wikipedia, the notoriously unreliable, inconsistent, frustrating, and often plain wrong "encyclopedia" website features mostly rambling, politically stilted, decontextualized "articles" that, by virtue of being free, have killed off the once-revered print editions of encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica.  To the Internet's, or at least, the electronification of data's list of crimes, I add the elimination of card catalogues and the serendipitous discoveries using them brought about.  Having to know what you're looking for and needing to type in a specific search query into a library computer is absolutely nothing like browsing through a physical card catalogue and stumbling across something you didn't know existed.  In fact, to all the Digital Age's (ironic) destruction of information and discovery, I think the elimination of the card catalogue is the worst.  Sure, I can still physically wander around a library's shelves, and I often do.  But it's not the same as having the entire catalogue literally at my fingertips.

Don't even get me started on the Agent Smith properties of Google and Facebook, documented here.  And yes, I've long wondered if humans are actually mammals.

As those who know me best will probably reflect, I've been against the Internet from the beginning.  And yes, I'm aware that there's a certain irony of using the Internet to complain about the Internet, but check this out if you've got the time - it shows you ten more ways the Internet is probably bad.

I'm not saying abolish the whole internet.  There is a certain use in distributing great literature and other important works across a massive number of servers, and the Internet has probably made good books like the Bible slightly more available.  But on the whole I think the Internet has acted like an ideological cattle pen - driving us actually toward uniformity.  As information consumers, we used to be free-range.  But how can you really explore if you have to start by knowing what you need to type?

The Electoral College - Preventing Panem (For Now)

Trump also won one electoral vote in Maine

It is among my core beliefs that both political parties have gotten far too materialistic and now largely exist to hand out benefits to their given supporters.  What, pray tell, does this have to do with the Electoral College?

Well, let me put it this way.  Politics have become a bread and circuses giveaway carnival like in Imperial Rome.   Since America now lacks a compelling intangible telos, or reason for being, politicians simply promise the most tangible benefits to their key supporters as possible in a vapid, materialistic zero-sum game.

In other words, without the Electoral College, a populist candidate could simply juice up the voting totals in any given highly populated state with wild promises, win the popular vote going away, and make American political culture even more of an unfullfillable promises arms race than it already is.  The next election cycle would simply see the next round of candidates trotting out even crazier promises, and so on.  The results of this are clearly seen in debt-shackled Europe and unstable Latin America, both of which have this problem.  Don't even remind me of the Roman Empire, which bread and circused itself out of existence more than 1,500 years ago.

What the Electoral College does is solve this - sometimes.  I don't think the Founders quite realized they were going to make things better by doing this, although it may have been in the back of their minds.  But the Electoral College carefully cordons off the bread-and-circuses phenomena into 50 individual boxes.  It doesn't matter if a candidate wins California by exactly one vote or with 87% of the votes - they get the exact same number of electoral votes either way.  Thus, because even American political candidates are still bonked into some semblance of responsible behavior - or, that, at least, there are tangible limits placed on their promising - we occasionally get the less irresponsible party as a result of this quirk.  Arguably the popular vote shouldn't even be tabulated except in individual states, but because the media wants to gin up the "social justice" crowd, they do.

Comme ci, comme ca - until we get someone even wackier than Trump, this system will have to do.

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

Preparing for an HRC Presidency

With candor I was shocked by Donald Trump's overall poor performance in the debates.  Again and again I told myself that the debates were where The Donald would make his case before the American people and finally disabuse us of the notion that Liberalism Works.  And what we got was..... rambling on the Syrian cease-fire and several repetitions of the phrase "big league."

Look, I am all in favor of the words "big league", in fact, Go Cubbies.  However those words don't amount to a full policy statement.  As far as I can tell, Donald has traded six to eight hours of debate prep for the Presidency. I hope angry tweets against those celebrities were worth it.  This is ridiculous.  How did he beat so many Republicans?  Where the hell were Ben Carson and Rand Paul with serious policy alternatives? How do we stop open borders now?

An HRC presidency will see increased attempts to allocate tax dollars to favored corporate lap dogs, a continuing dereliction of our military power, and likely acquiescence to open borders and, in essence, the beginning of the end of the United States as a culturally and politically separate entity from Europe, Latin America, and East Asia - including mainland China.  Rampant globalism is so.... boring.  The end of American exceptionalism will mean the end of any hope of the space program and a teleological view of history, where mankind strives to be the greatest it can be.  We will be on course for the Hunger Games, locked in a zero-sum scenario, divided amongst ourselves in a scrabbling conflict for resources the government chooses to dole out to us.

I am "Literally Face-Down in the Kool-Aid"

'Republican' strategist and Florida-based terrorism sponsor Mac Stipanovich thinks it's OK to vote for Hillary after he spent a couple good decades as a Republican.  Stiples insists that Trump supporters are "literally face-down in the Kool-Aid."

And I'm bothered - to say the least - about the comments Donald Trump made about women and sexual assault eleven years ago.  But then Donald Trump did something that Donald Trump almost never does.  He apologized.

I don't think he spent long enough apologizing.  I don't think he's genuinely contrite about the comments, and he kept saying it was "locker room talk" as if that excuses it somehow.  It's clear that The Donald needs, or at least needed, a complete overhaul in his view of women, and, frankly, human decency.  But at least it was something.

There are a lot of things that we would change about Donald Trump, and four or eight years in the White House are likely to magnify, not paper over, his many, many character defects.

And in truth, some intellectual part of me would love to be able to throw in the towel here and just say, "you know what, this is the last straw, I'm voting for Hillary."

When I consider the courageous men who died fighting a terrorist mob at Benghazi on September 11 and 12, 2011, I can't do it.  When I consider the 49 people killed in Orlando's Pulse nightclub on June 12 of this year, I can't do it. The San Bernardino attacks last December.  The Fort Hood massacre in November of 2009.  All committed by radical Islamic terrorists.

And the Barak/Hillary establishment regularly refuses to even dignify the safety of the American people by naming our enemies for what they are.  It's impossible to win a struggle against an enemy you won't even name.  To say nothing of the deep antipathy Hillary has shown for national security concerns, as exemplified by her atrocious handling of her private email server.

To wit.  I have a different standard for people like William Kristol and Mac Stipulations than the American people in general.  Conservative leaders and strategists should be hard-boiled pro-American defenders of the Constitution and the nation-state that produced it.  The American people in general are victims of a brainwashing educational process and a fuel-to-the-fire media that presents liberals as the only reasonable alternative.  I don't blame most of them for the views they hold, but I hope to be able to educate and reveal the real, powerful, and genuinely good America I believe exists beneath negative liberal propaganda.

I can now see beyond those things to the truth - with my original university education and traditional media as obstacles in the way of, not aides in the search for, truth.

If I, a borderline newly minted conservative, can figure this after only a few years on the firing line, then Kristol, Stipanovich, and the rest of the turncoat brigade have a lot more to answer for.

When leaders fail to lead, nations fail.

I am now beginning to see the scope of the vacuum that Donald Trump has stepped into.  If Republican leaders are turning their backs on him because of juvenile October Surprise comments that he's actually willing to apologize for, then the commitment to the cause amongst these leaders must have been growing hollow for some time.

I haven't failed to notice that Donald Trump doesn't paint by the numbers when it comes to his policy positions.  But people are sick of normal. They're sick of losing jobs to foreign countries that don't have entitlement support, labor, environmental standards, and a commitment to defending global freedom. Because of his willingness to speak out against NAFTA and MFN, his riotous popularity amongst average working men should come as no surprise.

And yes, I'm aware there's a race divide - and rightfully so.  Donald Trump is a bigot who faced lawsuits over his racist housing policies.  He should apologize to black people as he apologized about his grotesque 2005 comments - in fact, he should apologize and actually live differently, rather than hiding behind the fact that other developers were sued as well.

It would be great to have a tough candidate who is right on the issues, popular, and with higher integrity than Trump.  But the Republican farm team never produced such a candidate.  I didn't see Jeb Bush or John Kasich out there loudly pushing for a better trade regime with Mexico, and daring to suggest that maybe allowing an unlimited influx of potential Islamic terrorists was a bad idea.

So consider me drowning in Kool-Aid, Mr. Stipanovich.  I find it's bright red hue and thin sugary froth a delicious alternative to the toxic, burbling witch's brew concocted by those who can't see the good in America.

OK America - Let's Have a Peace Dividend Here

Alright guys.

Part of being a real man is that I can admit when I was wrong.

And I was hilariously, grievously, and spectacularly wrong about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a wicked, bloviated gasbag with the mentality of a spoiled brat teenager.

He is a racist tax fraud liar who should not be elected dog catcher.

However.  Bear with me here.

Hillary Clinton has committed felony crimes against America's national security.

You know where I'm going with this.

Lesser of two evils, guys.

My kids can't sue Donald Trump for racism, lies, and back taxes if they're blown to eternity by terrorists.

But I'm really, really sorry it's come to this.

I respect any vote that anyone makes in this election.

This is America - the greatest country in the history of the planet Earth.

We should come together as patriotic citizens and start to make things better.  I can't believe our political process has produced these two maniacs.

I am going to pray about this.

If you're reading this, I love you.  We are going to get through this together.

With praise to the Lord Almighty, who sent Christ to die and rise for our sins, to save mankind, and because of His eternal love, I pray for something better.

Amen.

Good night to all.

Soon, soon, soon, let's work on this.

Choose the Chambers with Only One Round

"2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. 

To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances."

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/439906/flight-93-election-hillary-clinton-threat-america

Since Abortion is Cool, Let's Nuke Seattle

     If a terrorist plot were uncovered to destroy the city of Seattle with a thermonuclear weapon, but all you had to do was arrest three to five terrorists to prevent the more than 600,000 people of Seattle from being brutally destroyed, would you do it?  Say arresting them wasn't even that hard - you know right where they are and it's simply a matter of alerting the police.

     No brainer, right?

     Then why we don't we arrest the following three Supreme Court justices, whose "pro-choice" - read - "I'm publicly in favor of child murder" positions make them the people in authority most directly responsible for the savage deaths of at least 699,202 human beings killed by 'abortion' in the year 2012. Because they've all stated publicly, their position that, in contrary to all fact, reason, and moral law, the Constitution of the United States somehow condones, and indeed, enshrines the 'right' to murder children.

     We expect to be led and inspired by Supreme Court justices toward a better concept of law and the Republic.  But the three below wade to work every day through an ocean of children's blood.  These three bear responsibility for the atrocity of genocide.  They should be stripped of their office, taken in to custody, and tried for their crimes against humanity.

      Justice Stephen D. Breyer

      Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

      Justice Anthony Kennedy


     Apparently, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor have yet to rule on the issue of abortion as Supreme Court Justices.  But their writings, speeches, and political affiliations leave little doubt as to where they stand - squarely on the side of their genocidal compatriots.

     Five seats of the Supreme Court of the United States have become thrones for murderous warlords.

     Like slavery before it, this issue will come to define the Republic in this century.

     This evil must be undone.  The American people have triumphed over empires, slavery, Nazis, terrorists, and Communist superpowers.  We must now triumph over the dark manifestations of our own failure to grasp unquenchable moral truths.  A new regime should be put in place, if necessary, to save the lives of the children these five will otherwise see murdered.

Rule Brittania

Today, the people of the United Kingdom made the sane, healthy, and democratic decision to leave the European Union as soon as possible, and I applaud them for it.

In truth, I don't know that much about the European Union, and frankly, I don't need to.  Nation states exist to protect individual people, nurture culture, foster friendly economic competition and healthy differentiation among mankind.  Like individual people, the can form alliances, have disputes, join or separate as wanted.  If Britain and France wanted to merge into one big nation, then awesome.  The whole continent of Europe as one big country, merged voluntarily, capital at Aix-la-Chapelle like in the good old days?  Sure, have at it, guys, why not? Pretzels, bordeaux, and stout for everyone.  But that's not what the European Union is. Obviously, what the EU is instead is an overly buearucratized mess, which has more than 10,000 officials who earn more than Britain's Prime Minister.

On a semi-related note, I don't think the discipline of macroeconomics should exist as a formal field of study because they're always wrong.  Just throwing that out there because I've been meaning to say it for a while.

Responding to a book called "A Hundred Authors Against Einstein," the physicist himself said, "if they were right, one would have been enough."  So it is for those who thought Britain "needed" to remain in the EU.  Britons were subject to a malingering parade of phonies, including a certain POTUS, who mixed fake facts with threats, which amounted to "Leaving the EU is bad because we'll make it bad for you."  Britons, showing their stalwart side once again, ignored these folks.

Hopefully, the United Nations is the next near-useless, supra-national amalgam to lose a member country with the word "United" in its name.

I Guess I'm Not Allowed to Get Tired of Denouncing Fake Republicans

Dear William Cristol:

Thanks for wadding up your credibility, and your decades of otherwise qualified service to America, into a small, compact ball, and then setting that ball on fire in your bathroom and flushing the blackened, ashy mass down the toilet.  Are you... offended by this?  You should be - but America should be even more offended by you because you have the insane, putrefying hubris to suggest running a third-party candidate to syphon votes away from the legitimate Republican nominee, Donald Trump.   I'm sorry you don't like his Twitter feed.  But there are a lot of worse ones out there.  Like the ISIS, Al-Queda, and Hamas Twitter feeds, which you might as well be re-tweeting for, given all Hillary Clinton's track record for protecting this country from terrorists.  Like I've said, why not just create a triune political alliance of moderate Republicans, Hillary Democrats, and Islamic terrorists?  Just admit where you effectively stand and we can have an up-and-down debate on the subject, rather than pretend that this is about Trump's supposed lack of qualifications.

Again, it doesn't matter what Trump is like, as long as he's better than Hillary!  Even if it's only by 0.1%, *we are morally obligated to vote for him.*

You know what, I remember when I was a 20 year old college kid and I voted for Ralph Nader because I couldn't tell the difference between George Bush and Al Gore.  Oh, wait, I don't remember that because I voted for a candidate who could actually win, the way anyone with even a flyspeck's of understanding or concern for the American political process would.

As a disclosure, I voted for Al Gore in 2000 because I was an raised by hippie parents into an insane, brainwashed college kid on an ultra-liberal campus.  Still no excuse, and I own my mistake.  I considered voting for Bush on a pro-life mindset, and that's what I should've done.  But the past is the past.  I made my mistakes and I am transparent about them.  In my defense, see the above paragraph where I explain that I was an insane, brainwashed college kid wielding a ballot I had been handed by a drunk Benjamin Franklin when he argued against property rights as a qualification for voting.  I'm sorry and I own it - and by the way, I wasn't a 63 year old editor of a major, albeit poorly formatted news blog and national magazine who is allegedly an old Conservative standby!

So who's crazy now, Bill?  Who's crazy now?

I hope Trump wins and appoints you Dishonorary Secretary of Misplaced Be-Clownery.

Black People Suffered 345 Years for Freedom Because the Founding Fathers Were Bad at Getting It Done

Let's take the number 1964 and subtract it from the number 1619.  The result is 345, and that's the number of years that people from Africa were legally oppressed or enslaved in America.

With all due respect to the Founding Fathers, love is an action word.  If they’d wanted to end slavery, they would have just ended slavery.    I’ve had it with conservatives who say that the Founding Fathers somehow had a glint in their eye and really, really just wanted to end slavery but were so afraid of dividing the country that they just couldn't.  High-flown theories about a civil war in the 1790's or other disunity are merely a papering over of the truth about the Founders: many of them were deeply compromised by their economic interest in keeping slavery going.  

And yet, liberals would have us believe that, because many of the Founders owned slaves - Madison, Jefferson, and Washington spring to mind - that we can never admire them, that naming elementary schools after them is racist, and that they have to be carefully boxed off and all but purged from history, other than as cardboard cutouts who are manipulated in a shadow play about the glories of the collectivist State, used to demonstrate "how far we've come."

The truth is far more complicated, interesting, and invigorating.  The Founding Fathers were great men who risked everything to bring liberty and the principles thereof to an entire nation, and the effects of their weaknesses in not ending slavery were multiplied. They held power, and yet, essentially wrung their hands in ineffectual concern for the institution they'd carried from the colonies into what was supposed to be free Republic where all men were created equal.  Paradoxical?  Of course it is.  This is America - have you met us?  And the even deeper paradox is that the Founding Fathers - even the ones who enslaved people really did pave the way with both words and actions for eventual freedom.  I think history books say that, sort of, but we should shout it out and restore the Founding Fathers to their proper place of respect and admiration while living in and indeed loving the intellectual tension created by the fact that they *weren't* perfect.  Sort of like, "love the sinner, hate the sin": Hate the enslavement, love the ideas that led to eventual freedom.

Abraham Lincoln was a cool-handed dictator who had a tidy, Victorian moral disgust with slavery and yet little love for the actual liberation of enslaved black people.  Just look at his actions:  proposing an end to the expansion of slavery so that it would slowly wither - and what's a few decades under the Confederate lash, anyway?  You're up for that, right Malcom X's grandfather?  Another action: The Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that slavery was ended in places that were rebelling against the United States *because they were rebelling*.  Hey Confederacy, just trade in your muskets for ballots, and we'll allow you to commit a Holocaust for another 43 years or so?  Great deal, right? What, you still want to be your own nation-state?  Aww, maaaan!  Or passing the 13th Amendment under duress - I don't care what Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis cooked up, good movie guys, but a tad idealistic - simply so that Radical Republicans would not embarrass him politically while he was trying to craft Reconstruction.

Look, I don't hate Lincoln.  His relative-to-the-times political courage was off the charts, A+, good job, stovepipe hats for everybody.  But his absolute political courage when held against a defined standard of All Men Created Equal is a C- at best - we'll let you graduate to twelfth grade, Abe, but you're lucky Common Core watered down the curriculum so much!

The irony, of course, is that Lincoln is recognized as a martyr for a cause he only sort-of believed in - black people's freedom.  But Lincoln's true passion, the idea of United States as a unified republic - survived as well.

Leaders whose real passion for abolition - the active, positive destruction of slavery and the liberation of our fellow humans - had such names as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.  These men and those they inspired organized others by the thousands and then the millions, nurturing the political culture that empowered Lincoln and other Republicans to at least say they were against the expansion of slavery. In relatively bright moments in 1863 (Emancipation Proclomation) 1865 (Thirteenth Amendment and abolition of slavery nationwide) and 1868 ("Radical", i.e. popular Reconstruction - as in 'you mean, there were so many Radical, true-and-blue anti-oppression Republicans that they overrode a moderate President and ran the entire Federal government out of Thaddeus Steven's boarding-house parlor?  Why, what were they, a majority that represented America's genuine mass political culture against stodgy 'regular' politicians?  No way!'), the whole system came crashing down in 1877 after a brokered Presidential election, and black American suffered under Jim Crow for 87 years.

Finally, we got the Voting Rights Act in 1964.  And if you want to talk about a politician who couldn't crowd surf - who was squished to the front of the room by passionate civil rights activists when they locked arms, singing and marching, and who forced this politician to then, pop - sweaty, stumbling, and disoriented - out the front door, where he would then have the temerity to claim to have led us there, why, that politician would be America's single worst President, Lyndon Baines "how many kids have you killed today" Johnson.  Yup, Mr. "we lost the South for a generation" Johnson - and why would enfranchising black people lose the South for a generation, which it didn't?

That, my friends, is a story for another blog.

Because it's been a big sarcastic night for this history major and it's time to go to bed.

Maybe the Benghazi Terrorists Will Join #NeverTrump Because They're Big Hillary Supporters

Today, whiny "conservatives" everywhere are pretending that they can't tell the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  So, what I think they should do, is grow up, put on their big boy pants, and vote for the candidate who is running against the candidate who allowed four Americans to be murdered at the hands of Islamic terrorists.  It's pretty simple.  You think you can do that for me, guys?  Because, I mean, it doesn't seem that hard.  Or maybe just vote for the candidate who, be it ever so small a possibility, is less likely to appoint a Supreme Court justice or six who will sanction the murder of millions and millions of children.  I mean, I can't believe we're even having this conversation.  If Trump has stepped on your toes, get some steel toed boots.  I would rather have a candidate who is at least nominally opposed to terrorism, child murder, and an incessant flood of illegal immigrants, however offensive he may seem, than a candidate whose actions demonstrate she has no problem with any of those things at all.

I guess what's really funny is that, as far as I can tell, I'm the most conservative person I know on a lot of topics, and I don't find Trump offensive at all (although I can see how other people do find him offensive, because he certainly does not sound like most politicians.)  I am in favor of gun rights, up to and including the infamous 100 round clip.  I am opposed to the murder of children, period (it's often given the sanitized, 'medical' name of "abortion", a term I suggest we all stop using as it tends to cloud one's reasoning on the subject.)  I am against illegal immigration, period.  I think, in fact, that the U.S. should put in place an immigration moratorium for five years while we figure this out.  I am pro-military - whatever that means - but it's important to point out these days, because generally liberals seem like they want America to lose every war.  I am in favor of free market economics within a context of reasonable trade policies, especially with third-world, developing economies and I don't think the government should simply tax and spend.  I'm aware that Donald Trump isn't a perfect, by-the-numbers conservative.  I'm aware that his political views hewed liberal for a lot of his life.  Well, so did mine.  People can change, and I'd like to think Trump has.

Still, I carry no illusions.  From my archly conservative perspective, Donald Trump, if elected - and I strongly hope he is - will probably be an annoying, centrist, dishwater President on most important policies other than immigration, and candidly, the voice of experience tells me he's likely to waffle on that.

But politics is the art of choosing the lesser of two evils.  And Donald Trump is vastly preferable to a lifelong feminist radical who sat back and did nothing while Americans were murdered, and who, without question, will go on supporting the murder of millions of children.

Four years of Hillary.  Four million children murdered.

Think about that.

So come on, guys.  Get rid of the hashtags, swallow your hubris, and do the right thing for America.  I'm sorry Trump didn't stroke your egos.

But this one is a no-brainer.

Any Midwesterner Could've Told You Free Trade was Bad, you idiots

Dear Third Way centrist Clinton-school lawmakers who voted for NAFTA and MFN status for China,

     
       You are staggering idiots.  I hope the rust that haunts every hard-working, honest town in the Midwest attaches itself to your hands and your foreheads like a Biblical plague.

       That is all.

       Your nemesis,

       Ben Phenicie

P.S. I now have evidence from your precious academic think tanks.  Don't you dare bother driving around our ruined towns to take an actual look.  Just read this, it's safer.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-26/free-trade-with-china-wasn-t-such-a-great-idea

Stop Bashing Trump, You Fake Republicans

 In a weirdly suicidal move, Republicans are now attacking their one great hope, Donald Trump.

 I'm aware that Donald Trump is not perfect.  In his frankness he can be abrasive.  And lately, his campaign has not been at its most disciplined.  Grouchy, sour grapes "Republicans" have emerged from the woodwork to attack him.  The liberals who control the government propaganda apparatus, education, and most of the media, have come to pile on, distorting Trump's statements and making him appear foolish.

 Donald Trump is under attack because he is not part of the traditional Republican Party political establishment.  However, the traditional Republican Party political establishment has been ineffective at combating Democratic ideas for over a century, and does not deserve to continue steering the party. Trump, by speaking his mind and actually formulating policies designed to benefit the majority of Americans, is a breath of fresh air.  He far more genuinely represents the party's base, and election results, before the Brutus-like knife Trump has gotten in the back in Wisconsin, have proven it. Republicans, like pharisee priests, hate him for it.

I don't want to vote for Ted Cruz, whose campaign lied and said that Trump's and Ben Carson's campaigns had been suspended on the day of the Iowa caucuses.  Kasich seems like an honorable man, but has not done the heavy lifting of generating the name recognition and national exposure needed to take on Hillary Clinton.  Of the remaining Republicans, Trump has the best chance of winning - but Republicans it seems have a bizarre desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to either force a Cruz nomination through a - no doubt legal - machination of the delegate selection and convention process, or by running an oddball candidate like William Cristol or Paul Ryan after a brokered convention.  However, Cruz, Cristol, and the rest of the establishment have overseen a regime that brought about the disastrous Affordable Care Act, vast welfare dependency, and the oncoming end of education as we know it with the advent of Common Core.

"Wait," you say, "those are mostly Democratic policies."  Precisely.  The Republican establishment made an Obama presidency possible by foisting ideas that drove George W. Bush's approval ratings below 30%.  In this environment, it was impossible for Republicans to win.  Those same steersmen are still at the helm, although the struggle to regain control continues.

I urge anyone reading this to vote for Donald Trump.  I am aware of his faults. The political process is not always pretty, but our nation is at stake.  Four or eight years of Hillary Clinton will continue our slide into mediocrity, dependency, irrelevancy, malaise, and ultimately, subjugation.

Minimum Wage is as Ludicrous as Taxing the People Who Make It

        Today, millions of people will punch in for work at honest, simple, yet often-times challenging jobs in retail, restaurants, industry, and other places around the economy.  They will be paid at least $7.40 per hour, as the Federal government mandates.  They will be taxed at what the talking heads tell us is a reasonable rate.  They will then, through a Rube Golberg morass of paperwork, "file their taxes" sometime next year, probably in February, March, or April, after the Internal Revenue Service mails them their W-2 forms.  In the meantime, the Federal government will have held their money for the better part of a year - to say nothing of the taxes they paid in January, February and March, which will have been held for even longer.  Even a bank would pay a tiny fraction of a percent of interest.  Many investments pay even more.  The Federal government will pay no interest whatsoever, and indeed, will deny these people, who work for a living, the use of their money.  The Federal government will use this money for purposes ranging from the legitimate - the public defense and the several Constitutional things the government still does - to the ludicrous. This is a travesty and this practice, which denies an individual the use of their money that the government has no need of, and indeed, is planning to simply refund them, should be abolished.

     A related evil is minimum wage, a grossly unconstitutional limit to what an employer can pay an employee.  Minimum wage creates generational poverty by systematically locking inexperienced workers out of the best possible source of practical education - a job.  The reckless and dangerous argument that minimum wage should be increased will only compound this problem.  All work has dignity, and individual people should have the chance to work at whatever the best rate they can negotiate is.  If it is below $7.40 an hour, then it is better for someone to get a job and work their way up then to languish on the patchwork of public assistance programs that the liberal establishment has cobbled together.

Republicans Play Checkers, Democrats Play Chess

 The Republican Party, despite having better policy ideas 97.4% of the time, has been losing ground politically to the Democrats for a hundred years because the Democrats have developed more sophisticated approaches to politics both intellectually and culturally. This refinement has been especially noticeable over the past 50 years, since the advent of the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 - the time when the Democrats, having murdered, maimed, and oppressed black Americans throughout their entire history as a political party, suddenly decided that they were the thought-children of Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

(This specific switch will be explored more in the future, but read Ann Coulter's Mugged for the eye-opening truth.)

 Do not kid yourself by looking at which party has controlled Congress and the Presidency. Democrats have far more effectively shaped the political culture and have defined the terms of the debate, especially since Franklin Roosevelt positioned unconstitutional actions that have drained America of its strength as being a benefit to individual people. Many of these programs now see their fullest expression today, and include food stamps, social security disability and the Department of Education.

 Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and both George Bushes have simply been allowed to move about a landscape shaped, delineated, and populated by Democratic paradigms. Only Ronald Reagan truly re-shaped the debate, and, while his efforts were admirable, even he only slowed the decay that the Democratic party has subjected the country to since that party's inception.

 Democrats control education, the media, and the government welfare apparatus. Through these implements, they have shaped the public perception to their whims, and so fostered a public that is partially or wholly dependent on them. This is their plan - to create an endless cycle of dependency and mediocrity. Individual ambition, expression, liberty and indeed, life itself, are secondary to these goals. It is a mundane version of what Aldous Huxley imagined in the Brave New World.

 But the Democrats lack metacognition.  While perhaps dimly aware that they are driving the country over a cliff - you can see it occasionally in President Obama's posture and deep sighs - he is too intelligent to fully believe himself - they carry on with an apres moi, le deluge mentality - "after me, the downfall - but I don't need to worry about it.  It won't be on my watch.  I'm a decent fellow who sticks up for the working poor."

These paradigms which have come to dominate American thought must be shattered. If they are not, our country will likely fall into ruin or subjugation within five to eight decades.

Four Unelected Tyrannical Warlords on the Supreme Court Vote to Allow Armed Plunder of Teachers

 Today, four unelected warlords in Washington, DC, voted to stick guns in the faces of thousands of teachers so that union thugs could empty their pockets. After the government-backed, armed union thugs have done this, those same thugs will use the money to further their policies of armed seizure of people's money, either through exorbitant, unearned "wages" enforced against taxpayers at gunpoint, or the even more efficient (for them) way of simply siphoning 'union dues' from people who are not even in unions. The government's collectivist propaganda wing sums it up nicely here:

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/03/29/472297953/with-supreme-court-tie-teachers-unions-dodge-a-bullet

 Ironic, of course, that they speak about teacher's union "dodging" a bullet, when the government's military-police establishment is precisely what enforces union plundering. Unions gained power in the 1870's because people were working themselves to death. They were comprised of people who did hard, manual labor for what was barely a living wage. They had some kind of tiny, fractional point at the time, since the work was difficult, dangerous, and performed entirely in the private sector, where the public was not asked to subsidize worker's wages. Jobs like steel working come to mind. I suppose you could find a right to collective bargaining in the Constitution by putting a microscope on the right to free assembly and the fact of equal protection under law. However, the knife should cut both ways, and "scabs", a term I love - I would be happy to be a scab to earn money for my family - could simply cross the picket line and make their own deal.

 Unions today will have none of this, and in contrast to the past, many unionized jobs, like teaching, are not manual labor jobs and are, in fact, paid for by tax dollars. It is ludicrous for a collectivized special interest group to plunder the public at will by demanding wages that are well above what the market would pay them. It is ludicrous to the squared for them to pilfer their fellow man by extracting dues from people *who aren't even in the union,* but that is precisely what the Supreme Court has allowed today. If Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg came into your home and stole your television, she would at least be arrested. The union gang leaders who she voted to support *are paid by taxpayers and non-union workers to support these kinds of policies for their jobs.*

 People wonder why this country gets so polarized at election time. It is because a tiny group of union leaders, journalists, government elites, and academics have built a paradigm of lies so all-encompassing that millions of people believe that outright plunder and extortion by groups like the National Education Association is somehow supporting the 'middle class.'

"Abortion" is a Made-up Word for the Murder of Children

 Most conservatives fail to gain traction in the 'abortion' debate because we fight on a battleground carefully delineated by our opponents. This battleground is the words we use, which narrow the perceptions in the public mind and make the "abortion" issue - which is the slaughter of children - seem like any issue upon which reasonable people can disagree. The question of whether we should allow people, who happen to have a medical license and are allowed, by a horrific perversion of the word, to call themselves doctors, to engage in the wanton and brutal slaughter of over one million children each year, is not something on which there can be grounds for disagreement.

 The murder of children is wrong, whatever we call it. It is not an issue like hydroelectric power v. coal power or even like immigration or health care. On those issues, perhaps the jury is out, but we have been deceived, mostly by ourselves, to believe that both sides in the 'abortion' debate are presenting reasonable arguments.

 Consider, too, the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life." The manifest lopsidedness of these terms is another valley in which those against the murder of children crouch helplessly while pelted from above by arguments made by those supporting medically sanctioned murder. Why the anti-abortion camp has allowed itself to be saddled with such a milquetoast term is beyond me. Again, these terms merely frame the argument as if both sides are being reasonable. "Well," we can tell ourselves, "it's important to value life, and it's important to value choices. So both side have a point, and I guess they'll just have to debate it, while the Supreme Court conveniently sanctions the deaths of millions." Those who support the medical murder of children can only be delighted to have 'leveled' the playing field as such. What is called a pro-life position should be called a pro-child, or anti-murder position. The "pro-choice" movement should be labeled the "pro-child murder" movement. Of course, if these labels were applied, they would obliterate the fog of reasonableness surrounding the issue.

 It is unreasonable to allow 'doctors' - all of whom should have their licenses stripped away and be convicted of murder - to kill millions of children. This is the simple fact. Anything else is just window-dressing.