Another Long Hot Summer in the Making

by

Just when I start to think that the fans of Hillary Clinton and her minions in the national establishment are calming the heck down, after the unexpected shellacking at the polls by Donald Trump of Her Inevitableness, the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua … nope, the insane is being cranked up to twelve – that is two more above ten. (Obligatory Spinal Tap reference there.) And the inmates of certain college campi are running the insanity all the way up to thirteen or fourteen, as witness the furious activists at Evergreen University, in Olympia, Washington State. They are bent out of shape over the usual crap that student activists are usually bent out of shape over – but in this case, the frosting on the cake is a video of a raucous demonstration by student activists making their demands, and generally acting like spoiled three-year-olds throwing a screaming tantrum. The video is linked here -And the students take? “We demand that the video created for Day of Absence and Day of Presence that was stolen by white supremacists and edited to expose and ridicule the students and staff be taken down by the administration by this Friday.” Sorry, kids – the internet is forever. Don’t want to be ridiculed by strangers who don’t give a damn for your sensitive little egos? Don’t do ridiculous things.

Ridiculous things like … oh, I don’t know – pose for an elaborate video shoot with a blood-soaked fake head of Donald Trump, especially if you are a pathetically unfunny failed comedian like Kathy Griffin. In whom, like the Kardashians, I am fabulously disinterested but such is theirs and Kathy Griffin’s unseemly lust for public attention that I can’t help knowing about them anyway, much as I would wish otherwise. At this point, it looks like this tasteless stunt as cost Ms Griffin a gig with CNN on New Years Eve – story here. I imagine that the suits at CNN are counting up the numbers and calculating how many more viewers they can lose if they really put their backs into it.

And speaking of media figures taking their lumps – last week we had the interesting spectacle of one Greg Gianforte, running for a congressional seat in Montana, charged with roughing up a reporter for England’s Guardian newspaper. Gianforte won the contest anyway, leading observers like myself to wonder if he did any damage to his campaign at all. After all – who hasn’t wanted to slap the cr*p out of a rude and obstreperous reporter now and again? This could get very popular, if incorporated onto White House press briefings. Sean Spicer could draw a name from a hat at the start of every briefing, and punch out the selected reporter. We could call it “Beat the Press.”

And finally – the latest to surface in the cacophony of crazy is the demand by a group calling themselves “Texas Antifa” to remove a prominent statue of Sam Houston from Houston’s Herman Park, on the grounds that Houston was a slave owner. Doubtless, Texas Antifa is trying to hop aboard the movement to banish statues of Confederate leaders and soldiers from public spaces across the old South and garner some of that sweet, creamy media attention … either that, or someone – either on the right or left – is doing an epic troll. While Sam Houston did own slaves (about a dozen, some of whom were purchased so as to keep a family together, or so sayeth one of the biographies I have read) he was emphatically against the expansion of slavery to the Western territories, against secession from the United States and resigned his office as governor rather than take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. In any case, Texas Antifa has called for a rally on June 10th. At the very least, this event may draw more supporters of keeping the statue where it has been since 1925. I’m no particular judge of prog-speak: Texas Antifa’s Book of Face page is here. Read for yourself and decide – for realsies lefty, stark raving nuts, or clever parody?
Discuss, if you can bear it.

34 thoughts on “Another Long Hot Summer in the Making”

  1. Regarding Griffin, on the bright side maybe this will mark the end of boorish, lame-brained buffoons being taken seriously on the political issues. They can finally revert back to being sideshow lunatics on the roadside, as they have been throughout most of history.

  2. I think those idiots in Houston, if they’re for real, are about to get a harsh lesson in how to choose a battlefield. Big Sam is the wrong target at the wrong time at the wrong place.

  3. Gurray – your words to God’s ear; if they could only go back to entertaining us. ISIS headchopping porn is not the least amusing, not at this late date.
    The Sam Houston thing is so MONUMENTALLY stupid, I’d be willing to give odds that it’s someone trolling. They are so over-the-top that I keep thinking it must be a parody, but then I don’t speak prog fluently.

  4. I won’t believe in any sincere action against the commemoration of slavers until Yale agrees to change its name. Fannying about with small fry reeks of insincerity.

  5. I found out recently — courtesy of my mother, who is on a genealogy binge — that one of my colonial ancestors was a slave owner. Which shocked and revulsed me until I heard the entire story, because I always took pride in my family being on the correct side in the Great White Trash Uprising Of 1861. (Sorry, but that’s what all my older male relatives called it. They still told the story of Southern trash with a Federal warrant busting up the family home looking for ‘contraband,’ and they still hate the men who did it. Scots-Irish, y’know).

    Anyway. He lived in Connecticut, and was called out in the militia in 1775 to march to the relief of Boston. He died of exposure in the field without firing a shot. A lot of guys died that way. But before he left, according to the scanned-in document my mother found online, he freed his slaves. I cannot march for liberty, he said, and leave slaves behind at home. Apparently they stayed on; nothing changed except that they began to be paid a working wage. One of them, an old man, died just after the Revolution, and willed his former owner’s daughter a f*ckload of money. I forget the amount, but it was several hundred dollars. My ancestor must have practiced manumission, like Jefferson and Washington did (and which Frederick Douglass’s owners emphatically did not). After doing his chores he got to to into town and do odd jobs to earn money to free himself. We don’t know that and cannot prove it, but where the hell else is an old black guy going to get several hundred bucks in the late 18th century…? He was busting his hump because he wanted to die a free man. And he did.

    Because it bugged his owner. He knew it was wrong. Even though he was a small-time homesteader, he did what you wish the more affluent Founding Fathers who trafficked in human flesh had done. Instead of kicking the can down the road and freeing them in his will, he made his own sort of personal declaration. My ancestor was a slave owner *and* a moral man. I can say that with certainty, and even a sort of weird pride.

    I think it was Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower: The Calamitous 14th Century who said that was must understand our ancestors before we can judge them. It’s a great read, by the way. I recommend it highly.

  6. Much of this is driven by black rage derived from academic failure of the Affirmative Action group. Yale and many other Ivy League colleges have been outcompeting the traditional black colleges for the black students who can write a legible essay and look respectable.

    At places like Yale and Dartmouth, the college has set up fake courses for these kids who are incapable of serious academic work. This is where most “Studies” majors come from.

    The kids are still coming to the realization that they are going nowhere, even if they have had this “education” paid for by the endowment.

    They are not burdened with the student loans the white and Asian kids have to repay.

    There certainly is a cream that has been skimmed off but a lot of these smart kids are not American. I have had foreign born black students in medical school for years.

    They don’t get American blacks. One of my black American students flunked out in spite of the other black kids (I had three others in my group that year) efforts to help him.

    The other kids were African (real African) or West Indies kids. The West Indies kids still have a legacy of slavery but they don’t seem to have the angry victim mentality of American blacks.

    One u=year I had a kid I thought might be schizophrenic. He was thrown out of a patient’s room in the University Hospital. The patient found him too weird.

    I finally figured out his problem. His parents were Black Panthers in Oakland and he did not know how to talk to white people. He had never known any.

    I finally made up a script for him to talk to patients and take a medical history. It worked for him and he passed. He was actually smart and got along with kids his age. I think he graduated.

    The Dartmouth incident involved black students who were not studying for finals and resented white students who were studying.

    I suspect the black students realized there was no need for them to study. The radical professors would give them grades they did not deserve in courses that were useless.

    They just knew they were going nowhere.

  7. A long, hot summer, and I suspect that fall and winter are going to be violent too. By the way, the Republican tactic of collaborating with the Democrats and fighting Trump on everything is not going to endear them with either side, much to their dismay.

    Another thing to watch is Portland.

    There is going to be a pro-Trump rally. Recently, they had a whack job scream racist things at Muslim women on their mass transit. Several locals intervened to protect the women [no political leanings mentioned, but the lack of mention makes me think that they might not be Leftists] and three were stabbed in the neck, two killed and one critically wounded. The PC interpretation is it was a racist Trump supporter. In fact, it was a Bernie Supporter who went to Jill Stein of the Green Party after Bernie was scrod by the DNC.

    The rally is going to be in a Federal park, and there are Federal permits. The mayor of Portland is demanding that the Feds revoke the permits, is claiming that the First Amendment does not cover anything defined as “hate speech” [there is no such law or ruling], and threatening that there will be violence if the rally takes place. The Portland Republican Party is openly speaking of hiring Oathkeepers or others as a security force. There may be a lot of full dance cards [and ICU beds].

  8. Our history books have been falsified! The mass demonstrations in Paris, London, Berlin, New York in the 1920s and 1930s that rose in intensity each month when each nation’s intellectuals rose against slavery should be remembered! My father recalls the great speeches by Lattimore, Tugwell, Hellman, Dreiser, London (whose “In Ten Days I Exposed the World” is unrivilled in its denuncations of slavery) and many, many more against the slavery of socialism in Russia. In England the speeches of Shaw and Wells and Gollancz rallied the English against socialism. A united world compelled Stalin to abandon the Show Trials, Holomodor, and mass executions when the world spoke as one voice against slavery. And….

    Oh, wait, none of that happened. Instead, thousands, nay, millions excused slavery when performed by National or International socialists. Socialism and socialists have never had a problem with slavery, and instead seek to implement it everywhere but only when they are the slavers

  9. I won’t believe in sincere action against the commemoration of slavers until socialism is expunged from the world.

  10. Oregon still has open carry. If everyone showed up with an unloaded rifle slung over their shoulder and ammunition on their person, that would wilt any potential for violency stuff. Probably.

  11. Several locals intervened to protect the women [no political leanings mentioned, but the lack of mention makes me think that they might not be Leftists].

    One of the victims is known to be a Republican, and a veteran. About the other two I’m not sure.

  12. The worst part about the Kathy Griffin episode is that she appropriated ISIS’s hacker culture.

  13. Phil – fascinating about your ancestor … the matter of chattel slavery was a great deal more complicated and … even nuanced than the current crop of SJW creatures can even begin to comprehend. I’m only going to get into one instance, which did have to do with Sam Houston. After he died, his wife Margaret was left in rather striated circumstances. And one of their former slaves, who had been working for wages in another area – came to her and offered her his life savings (a couple of thousand dollars, IIRC) if it would help. Being a rather noble character herself, Margaret Houston declined graciously – and told him to use his savings to get his children an education.

    Yup, Eris – socialism is just plain old feudalism, dressed up in drab new garments. Same old ruling class, same old peons.

  14. “manumission, like Jefferson and Washington did”: Washington left his slaves to his widow with the intention that they be freed after her death; she ignored this and freed them before her death.

    WKPD: “Jefferson had a long-term relationship with … Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello. Jefferson allowed two of Sally Hemings’s surviving four children to “escape”, the other two he freed through his will after his death. The children were the only family to gain freedom from Monticello. … In his will, Jefferson freed three other male slaves, all older men who had worked for him for decades. In 1827, the remaining 130 slaves at Monticello were sold to pay the debts of Jefferson’s estate.”

    So he freed four of his own children, and three old fellas.

  17. Phil Ossiferz Stone
    I think it was Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower: The Calamitous 14th Century who said that was must understand our ancestors before we can judge them. It’s a great read, by the way. I recommend it highly.

    I was the product of a North-South marriage, and as such had family on both sides of the Civil War. My paternal grandmother wrote up a family history. In reading it, I found out that a family member, a first cousin of a great-great-grandmother of mine, had been killed at Harper’s Ferry while fighting on the side of John Brown. Checking up on various books showed me this was history, not merely family myth. In addition to A begat B genealogy, the family history had some stories. One family member who fought as a foot soldier in the Civil War, brought home from the war a black who had saved his life. He worked as a farm hand on my ancestor’s farm until he died. My ancestor wanted his black farm hand buried in the town cemetery. The town fathers would not let a black man be buried in the town cemetery, so he got buried right outside the cemetery. Over the years, the town cemetery expanded, with the result that he now lay inside the boundaries of the town cemetery. My grandmother finished the family history in 1953, before the Civil Rights movement, so I doubt there was any attempt at embellishment.

    I did not find out until I was 20 that from the Southern side of the family, I had slave-owning ancestors. My grandmother told me they had the biggest farm in the county. For proof: a great-uncle was a Colonel in the Confederate army.He was elected, my grandmother told me. He got killed in the war. I later read that those who paid for the outfitting of Confederate soldiers got rewarded with a commission. As all my grandparents had was a quarter section (160 acres), very little of that wealth got passed on.

    From my experience in growing up in New England, I concluded that prejudice is not something confined to KKK members, but is found in all of us. We all have our in-groups and our out-groups. For those who think that rural New England is all WASPY white-bread, among my 27 classmates were a Eurasian, the offspring of a Tuskegee airman, an emigrant from Argentina, and a boy whose first language was Hungarian. His parents didn’t start teaching him English until he was 4. The town was a melting pot.

    As I now judge my slave-owning ancestors to have been wrong, I realize that future generations may also judge me wrong on something. My generation is not at the moral high point of history, but just as inclined to have the proverbial feet of clay as any other generation.

    My sister-in-law added to the family history. In our family tree she found a Scots-Irish man married to a Shawnee Indian, living on the Pennsylvania frontier.I believe that makes me 1/512 Indian. My sister-in-law located a notice that my ancestors had posted about their runaway slave. A white-Indian couple on the Pennsylvania frontier that owned a black slave. Whodathunkit?

  18. In Domesday book 10% of the population was recorded as being slaves. That proportion was presumably reasonably representative for Britain for several centuries before the Norman Conquest. The proportion might well have been higher in Ireland: both Gaels and Norse were keen on slaveholding and slave trading.

    So I am almost bound to be descended both from slave owners and from slaves. So is almost everybody else in the world, for the same reason: slavery has been very common in many places at many times.

    It must be admitted though that not all assumptions about the use of slave labour are true. Apparently the pyramids weren’t built by slaves.
    http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-tombs-slaves-egypt

  19. You did not think that was funny? No sense of humor!

    Kathy Griffin is now backpedaling because you are such a bunch of humorless poodles. Pitiful.

  20. Kathy Griffin is now backpedaling because you are such a bunch of humorless poodles. Pitiful.

    I had no idea who she is so her self immolation was of no interest.

    You share her hatred of American institutions, including the presidency, so you do not understand the reaction to her crude and unfunny performance.

    I felt the same about the ridiculous Bush assassination themes the left played for years. The difference now is that push back is becoming fashionable since Trump appeared.

  21. “You share her hatred of American institutions, including the presidency, so you do not understand the reaction to her crude and unfunny performance.”

    Hatred is something I don’t do. The entire universe is one thing and why would I hate myself.

    I laughed out loud when I saw that, so at least I thought it was funny. That you do not, is interesting, well at least to me. ;)

  23. PenGun:

    You can approach the Kathy Griffin affair from two angles. If it is purely only a matter of personal political preference; then differing reactions can be expected. I assume that on a purely personal basis we would differ in our reactions to say images of the executions of Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau, various ISIS leaders, Chinese President Xi, North Korean “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, or various relatively local politicians. I suspect that the reactions would be the expected ones.

    The other angle involves the nature of politics itself. Politics, all politics, is how a society allocates power and resources within the bounds of whatever social contract governs that society. In Western Europe, outside the Zones Urbaines Sensibiles, that political process is primarily non-violent and non-terminal for its practitioners. But the default, throughout human history, has been for power and resources to allocated by the process of killing off all competitors until everyone submits.

    Granting that you are Canadian and therefore are not as intimately familiar with the American Social Contract as expressed by the Constitution and the Rule of Law, but they are both primary bulwarks and the expressions of what our social contract is.

    Implicit in it is that the laws only be made with the active consent of the governed, and that resistance to law made or enforced without the consent of the governed is the norm; including by use of deadly force. The French referred to it in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as “the right to resist oppression”. Another way of expressing it here is to refer to the “4 Boxes”. “Soap Box”, “Ballot Box”, “Jury Box”, and “Ammo Box”. Roughly in that order, although the middle two can be swapped in certain circumstances.

    We view our Constitution as enumerating some, but not all, rights inalienable to mankind [in the species sense, not plumbing sense] AND as providing strict limits as to the powers and what the government is allowed to do. Canada and Europe consider rights to be granted by government, revocable at will, and are closer to Rousseau’s “General Will” exemptions to liberty than to Hobbes and Locke’s concepts.

    You do your thing, within your borders, and we will do ours.

    However, because of the constant tension here between government power that wants to expand, and personal liberty which we will fight to preserve; the need to maintain societal standards of civility is more important.

    We are in a time when the Democrat party openly denies the legitimacy of the presidential election. We are in a time when it is commonplace where Leftists will attack anyone more conservative than they in Democrat controlled urban areas, and the Democrat officials will order the police to refrain from enforcing the laws against assault and battery, or worse. We are in a time where Democrat controlled areas are denying the validity of duly passed, black letter, Federal law that has been in force for decades. Instead of opposing them using the courts, the legislature, and the constitutional political means; they defy the law. And it is becoming an article of faith among Democrats that saying anything they disagree with is “hate speech” and somewhere invisible in the Bill of Rights there is a hate speech exception to free speech that justifies violence to silence it.

    We are at a time when violence, and perhaps a hot civil war, are becoming more and more likely. So far the violence and attacks have come from the Left, and have not been actively responded to. Kathy Griffin, and her friends and media allies are Leftists, and are actively working to encourage that violence. She pushed the propaganda envelope a hair too far, and actually got criticized for her own actions. That is a small setback for the Left, but it will not stop them.

    While there are those, and they may include you, who would prefer the world on the coasts in Kurt Schlichter’s novel “Peoples’ Republic”; most here don’t. And eventually, people will meet force with force, and things will get rapidly out of hand. Once open warfare breaks out, the future of my poor country will be in the hands of the Gods of Battle.

    Until that day, I will work for the retention of the societal barriers consisting of those standards of civility, and the legal and constitutional political means. If that day comes, I will do my best to see that our conception of liberty prevails, at whatever cost to the other side.

  24. Penny, Penny, Penny … when an attempt at humor falls completely flat (especially if it is a joke intended to be sadistic and humiliating to the target) the expected response from the jokester is to whine, “Whatsa matter — don’t you have a sense of humor?”- thus blaming the audience for the failure to appreciate the joke. Didn’t work in middle school, doesn’t work now. Especially now.

  25. Sgt Mom, I think PenGun has the instincts of a troll. The superior tone and illusion of wisdom is a giveaway.

    He chooses to infest this largely civil group. I also participate in other blogs, some of which have been over run with angry leftists pushing the silly “Russians stole the election meme

  26. I know, Mike — that is why I prefer to laugh at him. And make pointed fun. There is a certain character-type which can not abide being made fun of. That is – real fun. Not the vicious and hateful stuff that apparently Kathy Griffin specializes in.
    She looks to have had all of her upcoming dates as a performer cancelled. Whatta shame!

  27. I’m sure that I’ve laughed at something that Griffin has said some time or other. It must be a hard way to make a living and getting harder as she gets older.

    I think that her real misjudgment was the proportion of people who would snigger in private and deplore in public. Any sane person would realize that this would offend a huge number of people, thus, it would only be appropriate to advance some transcendent principle. So far her only rational seems to be personal notoriety. This she seems to have accomplished.

    I’ll believe that some sort of civility has been restored when I see evidence. Otherwise, I’m convinced that Griffin’s “betrayers” are the hypocrites that I know them to be, just with better judgement.

  28. “I think that her real misjudgment was the proportion of people who would snigger in private and deplore in public.”

    I tend to agree. An anti-Trump play is closing early in New York City, I think the hysteria is slowing down and the left is behind the curve seeing it.

    Multiple terror attacks in Britain will reenforce the case for immigration control, no matter what the elites say. People who voted for Trump are content with what he is doing and many who did not are reevaluating the situation.

    The angry left is getting isolated from real opinion, I think.

    The election in Britain is now close when May thought it would be a blowout for the Tories. People are angry and they have no outlet for it but Labour and that way lies suicide.

    UKIP may make a huge comeback.

  29. I agree that the hysteria is abating. Trump is still there and doing things that he promised to do, despite the political attacks against him. The Russia investigation is spinning its wheels. Meanwhile the economy continues to recover and financial mkts appear to be discounting more regulatory and tax relief and continued economic strength. I think Trump will be reelected as long as the economy continues to improve and he avoids overseas debacles, which is doable.

    The UK election odds have narrowed but the Tories are still likely to win:

    https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics

  30. Yup, no sense of humor. I am somewhat gentle with you lot, as I rather like most of you. My rather OT troll is on a short leash here.

    Still if you can laugh at me, that’s good.

    It’s very sad your culture has been appropriated by wealth. That has to some extent destroyed your democracy and now you are actively talking about civil war, largely because of your wealth.

    Still empires gotta fall, and that’s the way it goes. To finally choke on wealth is rather funny too, but that’s another story.

    The head did not matter, it was the expression that was comedy genius.

  34. “PenGun, I rather suspect that there is nothing and no one who you would be willing to fight for or die for.

    Something I just ran across, for your amusement:”

    Well that is funny. Serious morons nearly always are. I’m not sure why you think it would upset me though.

    I’m pretty well done with fighting and _killing_, is the word you are looking for.

    Dying is built in. As a 70 year old who has spent over 50 years as a follower of the Buddha, death is a bit of a joke. I’m looking forward to it.

    The killing is what I’m unwilling to get involved with. I will not even harm my rats, I trap em’ live and deport them.

    I think your major religions, which many of you espouse, have actual prohibitions about killing people, which none of you seem to think are important, most certainly not your moron choir.

    I just took it a bit further.

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