Current Events

Dancing the Minnesota Walz

by

I think the most purely risible, ‘laugh out loud and roll on the floor’ headline of the current presidential campaign must be this one: Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans

This unintentionally hilarious take has been committed by one Frances Wilkinson, in an opinion piece for the entity known as Bloomberg.com. I do not know anything about Frances Wilkinson, but will venture a couple of guesses here: one, that she doesn’t really know any Republicans personally; two, that she is as acute a judge of what constitutes masculinity-fearing-Republicans as Rachael Gunn (the notorious Raygun of the Australian Olympic breakdancing team) is of break-dancing technique; and three, who the heck is terrified by the masculinity of a guy who looks like a live-action movie version of Elmer Fudd anyway?

Read more

The Coming Deluge?

by

“The official version of events in the UK media is that the murders are an isolated incident and the public must stop talking about it, let the police handle it, but the protests are a nationally coordinated far right extremist conspiracy, which must be met with aggressive force and further destruction of what few civil liberties remain.”

A comment from a guest post at Postcards from Barsoom, which can be read here: Who Speaks for the Children?

Violent protests, and even riots are happening in Manchester and other English cities, following a bloody knife attack on a children’s dance workshop by the teenaged son of Rwandan refugees. Three little girls were murdered and several more girls and their teachers badly injured – and such protests might indicate to distant observers such as myself that the native British are finally fed to the teeth with a flood-tide of migrants, and violent criminal depredations by recent immigrants that are basically excused when they aren’t outright ignored by politicians, the press, academics and activists. Popular historians often make note of social snobbery in the Victorian era – where the upper classes looked down on anyone “in trade” and sneered at the working class … but I don’t see that the Victorians thoroughly despised their fellow countrymen to the degree that the modern British ruling class despises everything about the ordinary native British working folks.

Slow But Exceedingly Fine

by

I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.

Read more

Best Eaten Cold

by

Revenge, as the old saying has it, is a dish best served cold. And revenge may not be the only – or the most dangerous – platter best dished up chilled. That would be the dish of anger – that ice-cold, sullen reservoir of fury in the hearts of every right-of-center, non-elite, law-abiding flyover-country middle American with Tea Partyish inclinations … a dish of anger ready to serve up in the wake of a just-barely unsuccessful political assassination attempt this last weekend.

You see, there is a considerable difference between hot fury and cold. Hot fury is impulsive, immediately violent, reactive and more often misplaced. It’s the unthinking destructive fury of the mob, lashing out indiscriminately. Cold fury, on the other hand, does not manifest itself in such spectacular fashion. Cold fury is focused, calculated, unspectacular; it takes its time, waiting for the optimum moment. Cold fury usually can’t be appeased, once unleashed. As I wrote some time ago, regarding the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance –

“The image of a “vigilante” most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable. The Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that. They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise – and they would not back down.”

Read more

The Tar-Baby

by

Never mind the currently-fashionable bit of wokery in the link explaining this reference, bolting on a vague accusation of racism (or raaaaacism) onto anything that a person of pallor says, does, or references – the metaphor of something nasty sticking harder and more firmly no matter how one tries to fight it off and disengage is curiously valid in the case of Joe Biden and the National Establishment Press.

The realization that Mr. Biden is a couple of sandwiches short of a full picnic comes as a horrible shocker … to practically no sane, non-partisan observer of the political scene for the past … I don’t know, decade? Two decades or more? But everyone else is shocked, horrified, discomfited! Until two weeks ago, he was almost universally painted by the National Establishment Press as the Sage of Scranton, honored and revered solon of the Senate, the experienced and steadying VP in the Obama Administration, a kindly and revered family man, beloved by all! (Or at least, somewhat better than that awful, bad, Orange Man!) Unthinkable, asking a blunt and unscreened question of the Incredible Talking Mop, Karine Jean-Pierre, at a White House press conference about Mr. Biden’s disintegrating mental facilities! The very notion – so rude, unprofessional, so very, very Deplorable!

Read more