Something Nasty in the Woodshed

The Kavanaugh-Ford-Feinstein kerfuffle appears to be this week’s progressive-tantrum du-jour, just as the Kavanaugh hearing itself was of last week, and John McCain’s funeral and epic post-mortem diss of his former running mate was that of the week before. The whole thing – a hazily recalled teenage memory of a clumsy grope at a booze-fueled suburban bacchanal – reminds me nothing so much as Great Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm and her incessant insistence on having “seen something nasty in the woodshed” which sight so traumatized her that she was able to ride roughshod over the rest of the clan at Cold Comfort for decades. What the ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ was is never actually described in the story – but Great Aunt Ada wields her hysterical claim of having suffered from it with the expertise of a master in conducting guided guilt trips through most of the book, until she is talked down from her room by the clever heroine.

I can only assume that Christine Ford somehow hoped that lobbing such a vague, unsubstantiated accusation in the direction of Brett Kavanaugh would have had the same paralyzing effect as Ada Doom having seen ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ decades previously. I assume that since she went as far as sanitizing her social media, she anticipated some personal scrutiny, yet hoped to avoid the uncomfortable questions asked by those interested in actually discovering the truth, if any, in her accusation. Not being able to pin down a firm date, an exact place, and having those people specifically named as having been involved at Dr. Ford’s unpleasant teenage experience deny categorically ever having been present, and that none of her one-time friends and contemporaries can say that she confided in them at the time, ought to strike a fair-minded observer as cause for doubting that Christine Ford ever encountered Brett Kavanaugh, drunk or sober, at anyone’s house. He seems to have been a man of restraint and probity when it comes to social and professional relations with women. Personal experience with the male of our species suggests to me that a total Boy Scout/Little Lord Fauntleroy as an adult has usually been that since before his testicles dropped, and during all the years between.

Frankly, I am too old to credit vague, unsubstantiated accusations like this. Christine Ford may have been quite the at-large juvenile party animal as a teenager, so I would accept the possibility of an unfortunate, drunken sexual experience being part of her past, as well as a good reason to seek relationship counseling as an adult. Yet I also remember the ‘recovered memory’ phenomenon, the day-care Satanic abuse bruhaha, as well as the more recent Duke stripper rape and the U of V fraternity/Rolling Stone fantasy rape-that-never-was. Yes, there are fads and follies when it comes to mental health and investigating sexual violence, or the possibility thereof. Yes, women are capable of lying, every bit as much as men, and of being vengeful, backbiting witches, completely capable of displacing blame for their own personal dysfunction on any handy target. Christine Ford’s target of blame for her personal woes seems to have landed on a male target of choice, because of his prominence in the news cycle. Would it be too much to ask of women such as herself and her allies in Capital F-feminism that they work out their traumas in privacy, and refrain from inflicting them on the rest of us? Seriously, I would like that. It’s gotten to the point where sensible women are fleeing any association with strident Capital F feminism, and some men are wondering sourly if it was really a good idea to give us a vote at all.
Discuss, as you will.

55 thoughts on “Something Nasty in the Woodshed”

  1. I do, Dan — mostly since I kept a diary. But unprompted by the diary, and my awful handwriting therein – not much. And put myself out front and center in a national matter, on those thin memories? NopeNopeNopeNope.

  2. I suspect this is a recovered memory perhaps from therapy for alcoholism. That is usually the case with women this age.

    With college age girls it is eating disorders.

    It is vague because it didn’t happen but she is certain it did.

    I knew a woman, a good friend, who had a problem with alcohol and was convinced by her therapist that her father had molested her as a child.

    Her solution, suggested by the therapist, was to pee on her father’s grave.

    I saw her a few years later and there was no mention of the molestation so she had over gotten over the delusion or it had faded as a force in her life.

    There are some suggestions that this woman had an alcohol problem at one time.

    It would be interesting to see all of her therapist’s notes.

  3. Yes, many of the ills and disorders that have befallen our Republic can be blamed on our gracious but ill-guided to allow women to vote.

    Prohibition was the first consequence, fallowed by the welfare state, no-fault divorce, and now feminism and its distortions of biological behavior.

    Certainly some women exercise more wisdom and temper than do some men. But if ever there was a fundamental difference in mental processes between easily recognized classes of citizens, it is between men and women.

    Men build and maintain civilizations; women build families. That’s the basic division of labor in our species.

  4. How about more substantial accusations?

    “See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” – Economist Milton Friedman (1991)

    “The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.” – William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995

    Not too long after making that statement Colby died in a boating accident.

  5. What’s going on here is a pure base GOTV effort by the Dems. Their strategy is get white liberal women to turn out in presidential year numbers, and that will be enough for huge gains in Congress since turnout among the population in general will be way down, as it always is in off-years. If Kavanaugh goes down it would be great, but Congress is more important.

    The GOP is playing it about as well as they can, given that the MSM is 100% against them, and that they have very tenuous hold of the Senate. I’ll believe Flake is a yes vote only when it actually happens. I think his personal and political interests are probably best served by pulling a “thumbs down” moment a la Maverick.

    I really hope the GOP has someone smart enough to figure out how to build a campaign aimed at black men making them realize that they really don’t want to vote for the party whose main platform is that all rape accusations must be believed. It shouldn’t be that hard to do.

  6. “It’s gotten to the point where sensible women are fleeing any association with strident Capital F feminism, and some men are wondering sourly if it was really a good idea to give us a vote at all.”

    To be brutally honest, a lot of us cis-het white men have been wondering about that whole issue for a lot of demographic groups, not just women. The premise was (and the promises that were made based on that premise) that “we” had somehow gained an unfair place in society, and that “we” were “oppressing” all those poor victim groups. We were told we were wrong, guilty by (and, at…) birth, and that if only we gave up our unfairly gained “primacy” to these other groups, including “our” own women, everything would be hunky-dory, and we’d all move off into a perfect sunset, together, framed by racial amity and comity between the sexes, to sit by the fire singing “Kum-Ba-Yah” for eternity.

    Please ignore the slightly hysterical laughter you’re no doubt hearing. That’s the cis-het white male “privilege” you hear giggling in the background, because what’s called “privilege” is actually responsibility and accountability, mis-identified for decades.

    The reality was that the whole thing was and is a scam, a fraud, and that the people we willingly surrendered our so-called “power” to? They were more intent on putting themselves into actualized ideations of their imaginary positions of primacy, and then abusing the holy hell out of everyone else–Especially we awful cis-het white males who so foolishly listened to these con artists.

    I venture to make the prediction that after the whole thing comes crashing down, which it inevitably will, that when the people who rebuild civilization get done (and it will likely be the long-suffering cis-het white males that do so) the boot is going back on the figurative neck, and it ain’t never coming off again. At least, until everyone forgets the lessons imparted over the last several generations…

    We’ve tried that inclusive and understanding route, and guess what? All y’all “victim classes” have managed to do is to validate virtually everything the old-school “racists and bigots” claimed about the various and sundry minority groups you’re members of.

    Seriously, if you were to take the words of the men who opposed suffrage and juxtapose them with what vomits forth from the “feminists” of today, you’d have to conclude two things: One, that the old-timey bastards were right, and that two, we should have listened to them.

    I’ve heard all my life how I was the beneficiary of all this wonderful BS that the feminists and counter-racists have projected onto the white male. Even believed it, for a long while–Until the sharp cognitive dissonance of observed real life became too much, and I could no longer maintain the inner mental facade.

    From where I sit, and have actually lived? I haven’t seen all that much benefit from being one of those white males everyone is down on; throughout my military career, I watched inferior and sub-performing ethnic and sexual minorities literally get away with murder (not prosecuted, for example, as a white male would have been, for unjustified shooting of civilians in Iraq), and still get promoted ahead of competent white male soldiers.

    When a black with multiple DUIs gets made a Command Sergeant Major, and one of his time-in-service and -grade peers who was a Ranger School graduate with multiple challenging assignments and stellar evaluation reports tops out at Sergeant First Class, you really start to wonder.

    Black NCOs and officers are consistently rated dishonestly, with massively inflated ratings for periods where they failed to perform and even had egregious misconduct incidents, while white cis-het males are held to what remains of the residual “standard”.

    Hell, I got personally passed over by our command staff for an opportunity to be assigned as a First Sergeant (which would have likely revived a stalled career, resulting in promotion)–In favor of a black NCO that spent his time in the job sexually harassing female soldiers, and who later got out of our initial deployment to Iraq by re-claiming Sole Surviving Son status, something he’d given up earlier in his career in order to get ahead after using it to avoid another assignment to Korea… Utter POS as a human being and an NCO, but because “black”, ended his career as a Master Sergeant.

    After the entire situation played out, I was told by the primary instigator for that choice that he’d only done it because there weren’t enough black senior NCOs in leadership positions in the unit, and it would have “looked bad”. I’m not particularly bitter, because I’m unsure of how well I’d have done in the job, but the fact that some of my people became victims of this ass-clown after I was moved out to make room for him (I had time-in-grade and service on him), I feel like I at least could have protected them better. Water under the bridge, and unknowable, to boot. But, I do know what actually happened, and most of that came down to “because, race…”. Initial complaints against him were ignored, because, of course, as a member of a victim class, he could not possibly be doing bad things to members of another…

    Which is probably going to be the epitaph for a lot of things in our society: “It looked bad, so we didn’t do it…”.

    In short, observationally? To be black, female, or a member of any other group than that of cis-het white male…? Well, it is to exist in a la-la land of zero accountability and responsibility, past criticism or complaint. You can literally kill people with impunity, and because you’re a member of a protected class, the investigation won’t even happen. Because it would make the higher-ups look bad, having put you in a position of authority and power.

    This is a state of being that cannot last, and will not. Power in society is going to revert back to those who are accountable and responsible, once the inevitable collapse happens. And, afterwards…? Ladies, I hate to tell you this, but your irresponsible sisters will have poisoned the well for generations to come, so the responsible and non-hysteric among you are going to have a hard damn time of it, participating in public life.

    I don’t support that, and I don’t like it, particularly, but that’s what’s going to happen. Assuming things ever do get fixed, that is… Long-term anarchy ain’t out of the question, girls–And, you girls (deliberate choice of term there, as opposed to the mature “ladies”…) are going to be one of those elements primarily responsible for that state of affairs coming into existence. Hope you enjoy it.

    So, yeah, I’m a bit bitter, observing this BS. Merit? LOL… That’s got no place in modern US society–It’s all about your victim status, baby, and if you ain’t a member of a victim class, there’s no room at the table for your sorry cis-het white male ass. When the majority of them finally figure that out, it’s going to be Katy bar the door, and I wouldn’t even try predict the final outcome.

    To paraphrase one Mallory Archer, “Sharia law? That’s how you get Sharia law…”. Something is going to give, as the bulwarks of our current social scheme fail under the attacks that have been made, and what comes after ain’t going to look at all pretty to those of us living today.

    Which is something that’s becoming more and more clear to most of us cis-het white males, and it’s why a lot of the rest of y’all are gonna be standing there naked and alone, and wondering what the hell went wrong when we abandon the whole current enterprise as a Really Bad Idea(tm).

    In the aftermath, I strongly suspect that the surviving cis-het white males are going to be fitting the surviving fools out for the figurative shackles and muzzles, and those won’t be coming off, ever again. We’ve pretty much seen where that leads, and when the majority of us wise up to the game, we’re going to be making a few permanent changes to the rules.

    Not that I particularly approve, mind you, but that’s where I see it all heading. The various and sundry “victim classes” have demonstrably failed at being good-faith bargainers, or being at all worthy of any trust or responsibility, and when you behave with bad faith, you don’t easily earn trust back. Right to vote? LOL… A lot of y’all are going to be lucky if you have the right to live on your own, without cis-het white male supervision.

    The late 20th and early 21st Centuries could be viewed very darkly as having been an exercise in demonstrating and proving the wisdom of those old-timey racists who insisted that blacks couldn’t maintain a modern civilization, and that women were too hysterical to be trusted with the responsibility to vote.

    And, the irony is? The people who proved that sad thesis weren’t the heirs of the racists and bigots, but the blacks and women of the polity who were listened to, and then granted the opportunities that they’ve pissed so thoroughly away.

    Doubt me? See Detroit, or any other black-majority governed big city, and observe the conduct of women like Feinstein and Hirono, both entrusted with Senatorial responsibilities and powers.

    If I could speak to the idiots that allowed all this to happen, going back in time, about all I’d say after slapping the ever-loving crap out of them all would be “What the hell were you thinking…? What the hell did you expect…?”. Exactly none of the pie-in-the-sky wunnerfullness we were promised has come to pass, and everything that has been demanded and then been granted has blown up in our collective faces across society.

    Come to think of it, that may indeed be the real root of the problem; none of this shit, from female suffrage to black civil rights, has been earned, in a very fundamental sense. It’s all been given–And, how do most people treat most gifts? When you get down to it, what have most women done, as a generalized group, to earn the right to vote? How long have you girls and ladies tolerated the fact that the only ones subject to the draft are the young males of this society? You expect them to look at that, and see nothing wrong or inherently unfair about that…? How long do you think that state of affairs is going to last, and you still manage to maintain full civic rights?

    Or, for that matter, what about most of the irresponsible males we give the right to vote to? When you pass out something as a birthright, you devalue it immeasurably, and the results of that are to be seen nearly everywhere in society today, where people vote themselves largesse from the public fisc, willy-nilly and without thought to the future.

    Were you to go back to 1890 and show them what our major cities would look like, under Democrat governance today…?

    I laugh, with a high, mad note to it all; women would have been put back in something like purdah, and every black and ethnic minority in the country would have been deported, permanently. Or, worse. To be honest, were you to show 1890 white male America what 2018 Detroit looked like, and then describe for them the arc of how it came about…? I wouldn’t rule out a genocide ensuing, were they to have believed you. They’d have seen it as self-defense…

    And, to again be brutally honest with you, I’m not so sure they’d have been wrong to conduct those pogroms, based on observed performance and result. We’d at least be able to walk in the parks our tax dollars pay for, after dark…

    They might not have believed, though, as it would look incredible to their eyes that their descendants would piss all they built away in a few short generations. Which we most manifestly have.

  7. It’s telling that she is happy to accuse but reluctant to submit to questions. I wonder if most of the public sees through this.

    Yes, women are capable of lying, every bit as much as men, and of being vengeful, backbiting witches, completely capable of displacing blame for their own personal dysfunction on any handy target.

    It is an unpopular question to ask most women these days but occasionally I have asked them with this #meetoo” movement if all of these women accusing are truthful and common sense tells me some aren’t. Yet I met one of two who insisted that all accusations are factual.

    Of course, from a man’s point of view, being accused is enough to tar and feather you. People laughed at Billy Graham for always having his wife present when talking alone with a female – in retrospect he was pretty wise.

    Think what Kavanaugh’s family is going though.

  8. Regarding the GOP appealing to blacks, we’ve had this discussion from time to time about how futile it is.

    I did see something awhile back that might be interesting. In 2016, Hillary obviously won the black vote. Not as much as she needed to win but still more than Trump.

    However, of the black male voters that did vote for Trump, college graduates outnumbered non-grads by 50%. Of black women voters that voted for Trump, twice as many were college graduates as non-grads. This is opposite of Hillary’s black voter demographics.

    Sure, it’s a small pool. Sure, elections have usually been about quantity not quality. But with the precision analytics now homing in on electoral votes and not necessarily popular votes, this could be something to look at in 2020.

  9. Politics is blitzkrieg, not trench warfare. You need to seize some of the enemy’s base. Trump did that with blue collar voters. The Dem response is to try to wager everything on angry white liberal women, who already comprise their base, and make no attempts at conversion. If the GOP can use immigration, the economy, and “believe all accusers” to peel off black males it will cripple the Dems.

  10. Hey, Anonymous at 12:53 PM: tell us how you really feel! :)

    I have similar stories about women officers in the Air Force advancing over more-qualified men simply because they were women. One more contemporary poster child is Martha McSally.

  11. I’ve got to take responsibility for that post at 12:53; I have no idea what the software is doing, because I remember entering name and email…

    And, yeah… I’m a little bit angry, observing the current cluster-f**k of a Supreme Court nomination process. The sheer obliviousness with which these assholes are tearing the institutions of this country down, in the quest for ever more and more power is disgusting, and I do not like where it is leading.

    We’ve managed to recreate our very own unaccountable aristocratic class, built up around the self-appointed Ivy League elites. That’s the real reason they’re horrified by Trump, and why they were so vicious towards Governor Palin–They’re outsiders. Just like the rest of us.

    The people pulling this crap truly see themselves as our civic masters, and they’re shameless in seeking advantage as they trample down our rights and lives.

    To be quite honest, I think the biggest thing against Kavanaugh isn’t that he may have groped another teenager in the decadent swamps surrounding Washington, DC at some point during the 1980s, but that he’s a product of the Ivy League elite. How many Yale and Harvard graduates do we have in key positions, running things? And, please point out the quality of their work, because I ain’t seeing it, anywhere. We need to rip these people out of the governance of this country, and replace them with people who have some respect for the rest of us, and who didn’t go to “Hahvahd”. If we ever do see a revolution in this country, my guess is that a diploma from one of the Ivy League degree mills is going to be the equivalent of glasses in Pol Pot’s Cambodia…

  12. Brian – I’ve seen one poll by HuffPo/YouGov that showed Ford was considered credible by 28% of men and 25% of women, and about half of Democrats found her credible. This was before all five other party goers claimed the incident never happened.

    I’m not surprised by that panel. Only a small slice the country believes her story.

    I’m pretty much convinced she’s embelishing an incident that likely happened in thr house Ed Whelan identified and Kavanaugh was no where near it, ever.

  13. The people pulling this crap truly see themselves as our civic masters, and they’re shameless in seeking advantage as they trample down our rights and lives.

    This is what Insty called “The worst ruling class in our history.”

    The Ivy League schools are worse than the state colleges, except maybe Missouri.

    I think if the founders, who were well educated for the time, could see what is happening, they would be horrified.

    It is another example of the Principle Agent Problem.

    The principal–agent problem, in political science and economics, (also known as agency dilemma or the agency problem) occurs when one person or entity (the “agent”) is able to make decisions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the “principal”.[1] This dilemma exists in circumstances where agents are motivated to act in their own best interests, which are contrary to those of their principals, and is an example of moral hazard.

  14. Tangential to this discussion of whether or not a teenage girl who had been illegally under-age drinking went upstairs to a bedroom at an unsupervised party with a teenage boy who had been illegally drinking even more and got groped (maybe not for the first time) … I have been listening to one of the Great Courses series about the debate in the late 1700s between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. It is starkly evident that most of the fears the Anti-Federalists expressed about the proposed Federal government have indeed come to pass.

    The rational solution would be major amendments to the current form of government. But the realistic outcome will be the collapse of a Federal government that has run up debts it can never pay and made pension & health care promises it can never fulfill. When the history is written sometime in the distant future, Chrissie Blasey will be portrayed in much the same light as Caligula’s horse.

  15. Alcohol as a factor is likely. Not only did she erase her social media history, others appear to have too.

    Christine Ford, nee Blasey, supposedly attended Holton-Arms girls high school. They publish an annual yearbook called “THE SCRIBE” and their yearbooks through the years are/were posted online. Until on September 17, 2018 Holton-Arms removed the years SCRIBE 82, SCRIBE 83 and SCRIBE 84, corresponding to Blaseys’s sophomore, junior and senior years, when she and her classmates were 15-17 year old juveniles. The blog THE CULT OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

    http://cultofthe1st.blogspot.com/2018/09/why-christine-blasey-fords-high-school_19.html?m=1

    claims that as soon as the story first broke, they researched, found, and downloaded those years before they were removed. Granting that I have no previous knowledge of this blog and cannot vouch for it, but if the purported yearbooks are true; alcohol abuse, and apparently keggers in homes where parents were absent, and on at least one occasion a male stripper are noted in the yearbooks. Noting that yearbooks are not exactly the most serious of journalism, even if the students were joking faculty advisors would be having litters of kittens born with claws extended. And certainly, if this rampant alcoholism was NOT part of the accepted culture, it would have been removed.

    Something to ponder.

    Subotai Bahadur

  16. “Alcohol as a factor is likely.”
    A factor in what?
    There is literally zero evidence this “party” ever happened.
    There is literally zero evidence that these two people have ever even met each other.
    There’s no reason to try to come up with complicated explanations to explain something that we have no reason to believe ever happened.

  17. Brian:

    I apologize for not being clearer. I in no way believe it happened. In fact I submitted a 2000 word article last night for a local paper on the subject of the lack of proof that anything happened. It will be out Friday [weekly paper].

    My intent was to point out that her brain is possibly more than a bit pickled [which may be part of her being a Leftist] and her Tovarischi are making use of it to wage warfare on the rule of law.

    The self-contradictions are indications of bovine end product.

    Subotai Bahadur

  18. My prediction from last week: The Dems go for a motte and bailey type attack to stop Kavanaugh. They make a r@pe accusation to slow things up as long as possible, then find something like an email chain where he made a dirty joke to get 2 of the GOP Senators to say they won’t support him, given all the bad publicity he now has. Something that wouldn’t have been a big deal by itself, but with the r@pe nonsense out there, tips them over. The liar never has to testify, her job to slow things up and cloudy up the situation is over.

  19. You all (w/ exception of Brian) are missing the point.
    It’s not “can she really remember?”, or “is she credible?”, “did it happen?” or even “damn women, they should never be given a right to vote!”
    They point is, Dems are playing dirty: if not this pawn of a woman, than another, and id not another, there is plenty more where they came from. http://coldfury.com/index.php/2018/09/23/annnd-thats-a-wrap/

    Why? Because it works, and why it works? Because Resps in Congress are shown themselves to be traitors. No matter what outrageous lies and despicable slander Dems engage in, they can always count on RINOs, a congressional majority, to support them.

    We became de facto a one-party system. USSR #2.

  20. I don’t personally care much about Brett Kavanaugh being on the Supreme Court–he’s easily replaceable, and I would prefer someone without any connection to Yale/Harvard, maybe pick the chief of the Wyoming Supreme Court or something–but we simply cannot tolerate someone being destroyed like this. Someone has to stop this, and right now. The Dems think stopping this nomination is a hill worth dying on, well stopping this sort of personal destruction needs to be for the GOP as well.

    So we need to make it to Thursday. I am among the many who believe that the Dems never had any intention of Ford testifying, and still do not. They will never allow her to be at risk of a perjury charge. So as we get to Thursday, she will back out. Guaranteed. Then let Kavanaugh take the stand. The GOP shouldn’t even ask him anything. Make sure he’s perfectly ready with a “Have you no shame?” speech for the first Dem who asks him about his high school background. Make these cretins own that. Then shut the hearing down and vote him through, saying the Dems are behaving atrociously and no one is willing to testify under oath against him, so we’re done with this.

    However, as certain as I am that Ford will never testify, I’m equally certain that Jeff Flake will never vote yes. So the GOP is up a creek, unfortunately.

  21. Because Resps in Congress are shown themselves to be traitors.

    My 91 year old mother swore at dinner last night that if they didn’t approve Kavanaugh she would stop voting Republican, a family habit for for 157 years.

    And as to the memory, after 50 years, I can still remember the backseat of a Rover 2000 with JS. Thanks for the memory.

  22. Right on time – another unsubstantiated, unsupported smear against Kavenaugh. This crap cannot continue – not when Teddy Kennedy, who left a woman to drown in a crashed automobile, repeatedly sexually-harassed women of a lower status. Not when Keith Ellison has no less than two women claiming that he smacked them around, and there are 911 calls to support those claims. Oh, and Joe Biden getting handsy with wives and kids, and Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades with interns and other women.
    The hypocrisy and the double-standards are nauseating.

  23. Its called ‘no rules hardball’, its what the big boys play. Both sides do this all the time.

    What I find amusing is that we have musings, of whether giving the vote to women and minorities, is a good idea. ;)

  24. Pengun:

    Actually, much of the current musings in this country over this has an undertone of how much longer before we revert to the ultimate in “no rules hardball” that preceded electoral politics as the norm; given that the Democrats have no respect for either the Constitution or the rule of law.

    In such a case, one has to wonder what the status of Canada will be with a Democrat party dictatorship on your southern border if they win. Of course, with the Democrats being the party of the Confederate states and with there being strong support for the Confederacy in Canada; y’all may be quite happy with it.

    Subotai Bahadur

  25. I hope you understand a national revolution will just be crushed. The people who are in charge, are on both side of the isle. A large part of what is going on is circus, you know a show for the masses. There is so much bread in many of them, that running across the street is impossible. ;)

    As we progress as civilized societies the general trend is to have power more widely spread. That will be subverted as much as possible by those who are in power. I can recommend ‘Yes Minister’ for instruction as to the details. ;)

    It seems to be moving slowly in the right direction, humanity that is. ;)

  26. Reverting to the mean condition of humanity, I think you meant to say, Penny – that is some variety of feudalism, with a ruling class, all comfortably in the saddle, and the peons and peasants working away in the fields.

  27. First, the accusations tell us the corrupt ruling class we have had for 50 years.

    Kavanaugh is too goody goody but he will be hardened. as Thomas was, by the malignancy of the left and what they are willing to do to him.
    We have a corrupt ruling class that has no qualms about destroying those that threaten their hegemony.

    This is the Red Guards again.

    He had privileges that I did not have but it sounds to me he made the most of them.

    Personally, I’m ready to burn the whole house down.

  28. I really hope the GOP has someone smart enough to figure out how to build a campaign aimed at black men making them realize that they really don’t want to vote for the party whose main platform is that all rape accusations must be believed. It shouldn’t be that hard to do.

    It blows my mind that there are still, after all these decades, conservatives who think this way. A baby boomer thing? The best you can hope for with black males is that they won’t hate you so much that they are willing to line up at the polls and vote Dem in great numbers. Lower black turn-out certainly helps Republicans.

    Kavanaugh is too goody goody but he will be hardened. as Thomas was, by the malignancy of the left and what they are willing to do to him.

    That’s the one potential positive out of all this – assuming he actually ends up on the Supreme Court. In this respect the Left are playing a dangerous game. They’ve had milquetoast conservatives to beat up on for decades but now their own hatred may rebound on them.

  29. “Reverting to the mean condition of humanity, I think you meant to say Penny”

    No not really. Its the trend to democracy I was talking about, more people sharing power. That those in power use it to their purpose, is a given.

    Its likely, as many have pointed out, that Trump will be tossed under the bus when he has done most of what he and they want. Then we can blame it all on Trump, and Pence will save America. ;)

  30. It blows my mind that there are still, after all these decades, conservatives who think this way.

    Trump thinks this way. That’s what his sentencing-reform initiative is about. And it appears to be working as he has gained black support. Black voters are still overwhelmingly Democrats but he is peeling off black votes at little cost and no cost to his support from other voter groups. It is a mistake for pols to take any group’s votes for granted or to write off any group’s votes. The Democrats take black and other minority votes for granted. Putting those votes into play is smart politics as long as you don’t try to do it by outdoing the Dems on their own terms.

  31. I’m still amazed how few people see the vulnerabilities the Dems are giving themselves with open borders, and not all just with white voters. They try to pair it with shrieks of racism against the GOP to keep blacks from looking that way, but that’s not going to work forever.

  32. Its likely, as many have pointed out, that Trump will be tossed under the bus when he has done most of what he and they want. Then we can blame it all on Trump, and Pence will save America. ;)

    I see you have been listening to Trudeau, Fidel’s boy.

  33. There is a good example in the upcoming election for Chicago mayor. Now that Rahm Emanuel has been forced to step aside, the race is wide open with about 20 or so people running.

    The most interesting candidate is Willie Wilson, a black entrepreneur who admitted he voted for Trump in 2016.

    He got in trouble earlier in the year for passing out money at campaign rallies. I thought it was a hilarious bit of guerrilla theater. He’s exactly correct when he says Chicago politicians have always been doing something similar, except they steal taxpayer money and give it to cronies. At least Willie was using his own money to give to the poor that have been the real losers under Democrat hegemony.

    The conventional wisdom is that as an outsider he doesn’t have a chance, but I think he’s the front runner. If the large number of candidates can split the Machine’s usual election day “honest graft”, Willie could potentially turn everything completely upside down.

  34. “I see you have been listening to Trudeau, Fidel’s boy.”

    Wow! I doubt he has even thought about this, let alone said anything.

    These are Americans coming up with this possible scenario. It had occurred to me actually, but I never went far with it.

  35. When a black with multiple DUIs gets made a Command Sergeant Major, and one of his time-in-service and -grade peers who was a Ranger School graduate with multiple challenging assignments and stellar evaluation reports tops out at Sergeant First Class, you really start to wonder.

    My brother-in-law, who has a Masters in Public Administration, finally gave up taking the Sergeants’ exam in the Chicago PD. For years only blacks were promoted. You can see how great this policy has made the Chicgo PD.

    In Los Angles, the same race based promotion policy gave them the Rampart Scandal, all of whose participants were beneficiaries of the policy.

    Meanwhile The Navy covers up the fact that the collision that killed 7 sailors was caused by two female deck officers who were not speaking.

    The Army, not to be left out has “graduated” unqualified female officers from Ranger School.

  36. Gurray:
    However, of the black male voters that did vote for Trump, college graduates outnumbered non-grads by 50%. Of black women voters that voted for Trump, twice as many were college graduates as non-grads. This is opposite of Hillary’s black voter demographics.

    Here’s a breakdown of how African-Americans voted in the 2016 election.

    Traditional thinking going into the election seemed to be that voters who had reached higher levels in their education were more likely to vote for Clinton, with Trump likely to draw in votes from those without a college degree. And nationally, the exit polls reflect that: 52% of college graduates cast their ballot for Hillary, and she earned 58% of votes cast by those with a postgraduate education.

    But votes among African-Americans show a different trend, with black college graduates voted for Clinton at a smaller margin than black voters as a whole. Black women without college degrees were the most strongly in favor of Clinton, giving her 95% of their vote (compared to 91% for black women with a degree), while black men with a college degree gave only 78% of their votes to Clinton and 16% to Trump. This may be due to the fact that Democrats’ positions often favor low-income populations, whereas educated African-Americans with a higher socioeconomic status may be more inclined to vote for more conservative economic policies.
    African-American 2016 Votes by Educational Level (%) Clinton Trump
    Black men (w college degree)78 16
    Black men (no college degree) 82 11
    Black women (w college degree) 91 6
    Black women (no college degree) 95 (3?)

    The article goes on to point out that younger African-Americans were less likely to vote for Hillary, but no more likely than their elders to vote for Trump. Their non-Hillary votes went for Independents.

    African-American 2016 Votes by Age: Hillary Trump Other
    18-29 83 9 8
    30-44 87 7 6
    45-64 90 9 1
    65+ 90 9 1

    Interesting that the better-educated black demographic was more likely to vote for the “racist” Trump.

  37. Back in the 1960s, Malcolm X gave a speech in which he berated his fellows for allowing their votes to be taken for granted by a Democrat establishment which did nothing for them. He seemed to have recognized the old wisdom that anything which is given for nothing is not valued by the recipient. Malcom X’s argument is probably even stronger today, given the takeover of the Democrat Party by super-rich white males with a rather dubious agenda.

  38. With all the Supreme Court noise this passed unnoticed.

    President Trump just signed on to the Globalist Drug War. At the UN. At a meeting he sponsored. Who else is covering it besides me? The CTH (link at the link)
    http://classicalvalues.com/2018/09/the-dea-and-the-drug-cartels-own-trump/

    “See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” – Economist Milton Friedman (1991)

    “The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.” – William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995

    Not too long after making that statement Colby died in a boating accident.

    Alfred McCoy – The Politics of Heroin – CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade – pdf

  39. Interesting that the better-educated black demographic was more likely to vote for the “racist” Trump.

    You know that if we’re reading about this then Trump’s campaign data team is/was well aware of it. It isn’t enough to move the needle in the deep blue states like New York or California, but in metropolitan areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania it could make some difference.

    Political success has transformed from being the best at pushing an agenda to being the best at reacting to demographics and their shifting norms. Despite the outrage over foreign meddling and social media manipulation, the voters are still driving the bus.

  40. I’m put in mind of something Harry Truman spoke of in an interview decades ago, which was printed about 25y ago in American Heritage.

    Truman was particularly irked by the “professional liberal,” whom he distinguished from “real liberals” like himself. Professional liberals lived by slogans and saw American politics as an ideological war, which Truman considered alien to the genius of the Democratic party. In his lifetime the party was a sort of political melting pot in which conservative Southerners and moderate border-state men like Truman found common ground with Eastern liberals. “Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise,” Truman said. “In my experience they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.”

    Nowadays, it seems as though almost all liberals are Truman’s professionals….

    https://www.americanheritage.com/content/eight-days-harry-truman

  41. “Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise,” Truman said. “In my experience they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.”

    We call them The Deep State now. There are two levels.One, the top, is hedge fund billionaires who direct the Democratic Party these days and profit from crony capitalism and unfair international trade.

    I would not rule out China as an actor in all this. They bought the Clintons in 1996.

    The lower level are the Administrative State,. I did a post on them a while ago.

    I think Angelo Codevilla’s piece about “The Ruling Class” has the best explanation.

    When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

    And they are incompetent , as I give examples of in that post.

  42. I only want to agree with what someone wrote upthread. Can we please have a SCOTUS Judge who did NOT go the Ivy League?

    Incredible as it may seem, All 9 SCOTUS judges have attended either Harvard or Yale Law school!

    By comparison: FDR appointed 5 Justices who didn’t go to Ivy League Law Schools.

  43. Can we please have a SCOTUS Judge who did NOT go the Ivy League?

    Indeed. I’d also wish we had more justices with broader real-world experience in a variety of ways that Ivy careerists may lack. Clarence Thomas certainly qualifies since he’s old enough to have experienced state mandated racial discrimination at first hand. It might not hurt also to have people on the Court who’ve been arrested, experienced abusive tax audits, run small businesses, etc. (I don’t think getting questioned for throwing ice in a college bar counts.)

  44. It might not hurt also to have people on the Court who’ve been arrested, experienced abusive tax audits, run small businesses, etc.

    For that matter our legislators. Should be mandatory. For one we would get fewer idiotic laws in CA.

  45. David that is an excellent link and post. I read Drucker’s books years ago, including his autobiography.

    In the 1980s, I was president of the County Medical Association in Orange County. We were going through the discussion of health care reform and trying to come up with some ideas that might work at a local level. At the time, the courts and the FTC had banned one such attempt in the Arizona vs Maricopa County case in which, in an attempt to defuse complaints about high fees, the local medical association set up a program in which doctors who were members agreed to limit their fees to a maximum level.

    The association was sued and the USSC ruled that the plan was illegal price fixing. MAXIMUM price fixing. It was a voluntary association with no enforcement power beyond membership. At the time, I wanted to invite Drucker to a Saturday seminar on what to do.

    His price was $10,000 for an hour or a full day, He was at Claremont then.

    We couldn’t’t afford him. The AMA could have but they were busy selling out members with the Harvard School of Public Health and selling the DRG system to Medicare.

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