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A Message From The Editor…
Friends and subscribers, in the interest of spreading the joys of liberty farther and wider, I've started publishing content on Substack. This site will remain active, but not carry all new content, so please, if you've enjoyed what you've read here, please subscribe!...
Compliance Over Compassion
Mask and vax. Or else. That seems to be the sum total of government's policy set on managing COVID in our society. Excepting those benighted red states (and some blue ones, I'm glad to report), which any right-thinking-leftist knows is being run by idiots and...
A Quaint Little British Bribery Scandal
On reading about the British scandal involving Owen Paterson, Minister of Parliament (pictured), I yelled "Pikers!" Then I just wanted to pat them on the head, innocents as they are to political grifting: the British are undone with shame by behavior that is the coin...
You Don’t Get It Back
The latest inflation number was just announced. It's not pretty. Rather ugly, in fact. 6.8%, annualized, the biggest number in nearly 40 years. The Democrats, who are running the nation (into the ground, in the eyes of more and more based on plummeting poll numbers),...
OJ’s Legacy
Or... The Continuing Irrelevance Of The Individual Jussie Smollett was convicted yesterday of five felonies relating to his (can we omit the "alleged" now?) staging of a hate-crime attack upon himself. No one who took an honest look at the facts of the matter is...
When Everything Is Illegal…
One of the few things our divided America agrees on is that our criminal justice system is failing. That the explanation and solution would be polar opposites is a separate matter. Leftists point at the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting, Righties point at the Darrel Brooks...
In Defense of Trolling
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and probable Presidential aspirant, recently signed a set of bills banning the mandating of COVID vaccines by schools and businesses. That he did so in the town of Brandon, population 100K and nearly a 5 hour drive from the state...
Some Lives Don’t Matter
Consider this reaction to the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal: 'if he were black, he'd be in jail.' Such a sentiment was voiced by many on the Left when they heard "not guilty on all counts." Let's look past the blind partisanship overriding the very obvious facts of the...
The Bail Quandary
About two and a half years ago, New York State, in a paroxysm of progressive beneficence, overhauled its cash bail system for those accused of crimes. For the past couple years, only those accused of violent felonies were required to post bail. The rest were simply...
Rittenhouse and the Racists
Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on 5 counts of homicide yesterday. Good. He should never have been charged in the first place. An arms-length assessment of the facts, once the fog of biased and tendentious reporting got cleared, made that obvious. To all but the Left's...
To Petition The Government
There are many things the Government is empowered to do. There's a list of them in the Constitution. A couple centuries of revision, a hundred-year-plus Progressive movement, and a few egregious moments of Supreme Court malpractice have expanded the list far beyond...
Opinion
21st Century Scalpers
The act of scalping (the cutting off of a part of a victim's scalp as a trophy, not the act of reselling event tickets at a large markup) has been part of human history for thousands of years, and only fell out of practice in the past century or two. It's a barbaric...
Identity Trumps Science
Ponder this bit, from an article about how identity politics has infiltrated archaeology: [T]he archaeologist Bruce Bourque recently published a lengthy essay on Quillette about his attempts to decipher the genetic identity of an ancient maritime New England tribe...
Responsibility To Protect
Much is being made of our "abandoning" Afghanistan (they abandoned us, when they did not "cowboy-up" to defend themselves, is how I see it). Well: Civilized world governments have a doctrine against assaults on human rights of the kind the Taliban make their mode:...
The Rittenhouse Lesson
Most of you know the story. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old resident of Illinois (and , armed himself with an AR-15 variant and drove over to neighboring Kenosha, WI, during a period of protests and unrest following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police. Rittenhouse...
The Left’s Frank Problem
Sixteen years ago, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency, columnist Thomas Frank published What's The Matter With Kansas, wherein he basically posited that the Democrats lost the heartland because they didn't focus sufficiently on promising economic largesse...
Bernie’s Legacy
Joe Biden, the incredible shrinking President, went hat-in-hand to Congress this past week, mewling that his Presidency (only 10 months old) is hinging on the passage of the infrastructure and social spending bills currently stalled in Congress. The hangup? A couple...
No Faith In Constitution
I did a bit of streaming service surfing last weekend, searching for a new television show to watch. I typically gravitate to original content by the streamers and some of the more "quality" cable channels, having found that the broadcast networks' modern content is...
Whatever They Want
"We probably will have a wealth tax," said Nancy Pelosi on Sunday. The Democrats are in a mad scramble to cobble together a Frankenstein's-monster tax-and-spend bill they've laughably labeled "Build Back Better." They are reaping the gift given to them by the...
Mandates and Narratives
Professional basketball player Kyrie Irving has opted to resist a COVID vaccination mandate. Not the NBA's mandate - the NBA has not established a vaccine requirement. New York City's mandate, which has trickled down to Irving's team, the Brooklyn Nets. The team has...
Rise of Conscience, Fall of Charity
We are in the midst of a massive cultural awareness of race and racism that future historians might define as an "awakening" (or Marxists as an "expansion of consciousness"). In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. I have frank conversations with many people of...
Destroying America
The Art Institute of Chicago recently announced an end to its 60 years-running docent program. 122 volunteers, averaging more than 15 years experience, who gave "tours to millions, including more than 100,000 schoolchildren each year, many from the city’s mostly poor,...
Identity Hypocrites
Get on an airplane. Work at a government job. Enter a government building. Open a checking, savings, brokerage, or retirement account. Apply for a credit card, loan, or mortgage. Apply for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, food stamps, or other government...
Our OPM Culture
Back in 1969, bureaucrats testified to Congress that 155 high earners had managed to work their tax returns to where they paid no income tax... in one specific year. Anyone who understands the vagaries of business investing, capital gains and losses, tax loss...
Pax Taiwanica
This past week, China rattled a few sabers over Taiwan. Almost literally, in that China sent several dozen military jets into Taiwan's defense zone as part of a celebration of the PRC's founding. Much huffing and puffing ensued, along with the inevitable (and...
Security Of Base
Most Americans are convinced the nation has gone off the rails. The proofs: a mountain of debt (with much more to come) with no Marshal Plan leaps over normal market evolutions to show for it (and with none coming); our political system devolved into tribal warfare...
Diverse, But Uniform
Consider the bipolar nature of our society today. Modern society, thanks to the new tool that is social media, has created an enormous reward system for people who manage to stand above the crowd, who get themselves noticed, who are exceptional enough to attract...
Non-Denominational Racism
We are coming up on 15 months since George Floyd died under Derek Chauvin's knee. Despite nation-wide protests and massive dialogues at the local, state, and national levels, we've seen no institutional changes to speak of in response to this event. That's not for...
What’s Yours Is Theirs
Time and again, I hear the same refrain. My concerns, warnings, and accusations regarding the advent of socialist thinking and policy in America is baseless, or ill-founded, or a Fox News talking point regurgitation, or paranoia, or petulance. Simultaneously, I bear...
Collective Shame
A friend and I recently had a conversation, wherein he recalled the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot and the reaction he witnessed from some political acquaintances. That reaction, encapsulated as "this is on you, Trump voters," had him pondering his visceral...
The New Tokenism
Hollywood is making another attempt at making a film version of the science fiction classic Dune. We already have David Lynch's 1984 version by David Lynch, which I didn't care for, and a SyFy channel miniseries from 2000, which I enjoyed rather more. The new movie...
People Differ
There's a litmus test applied by social justice types in their endless hunt for discrimination and oppression. It's a simple one: they look at a profession, or an industry, or an economic stratum, or a town/neighborhood, or some other parseable segment of society,...
Global Warming’s Third Way
News outlets are reporting that electricity prices are spiking in Europe. Apparently, a lull in offshore winds is reducing windmill power output, causing a mad scramble to buy coal and gas to make up for the shortfall. Their best buddy Vladimir Putin is jacking up the...
The Suicide Resolution
There will come a day, though it might not come for a long time, when Trump's presidency is assessed rationally rather than emotionally. When the tweets and rhetoric have faded to irrelevance and insignificant footnote, and the focus placed on policies and actions......
Suicide By Sycophancy
How many articles predicting the ruin that became Afghanistan's end-game have you read? I recently wrote one, and in all my study for it, I could not find a single source that forecast the speed of the Afghan National Army (ANA) collapse. In the many versions I tried,...
Compounding Incompetence
America's exit from Afghanistan is a monumental debacle born of a failure of leadership utterly breathtaking in its magnitude. Hundreds of Americans and perhaps tens of thousands of Afghan allies were abandoned to the predations of an emboldened Taliban in a rush to...
About Those Adults
Not that long ago, right after Trump shocked the civilized world by defeating Herself in an election that she and all those adults figured would be a rubber-stamp of her turn at the wheel, many sky-screamers sought to comfort their aggrieved fragilities by assuming...
Broken Trust
Trump held a rally the other day, in which he stood behind a lectern that reads "Save America," touted his successes. Included among these was the fast-tracking of vaccine development and approval. Then he did something he should have done more forcefully months ago....
The Great American Crack Up
If we've learned one thing from the first seven months of Joe Biden's presidency, it's that there seems to be no "bottom" to incompetence in American politics. Eight years of Obama-induced malaise and divisiveness ushered in the bull-in-a-china shop that was Trump,...
The New Blasphemy
When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons that depicted the image of Mohammed, back in 2005, the Islamic world responded with violent demonstrations around the world. More than 250 were killed in these demonstrations. Danish diplomatic...
The Buck Stops… Where?
Joe Biden made a great big deal of his comprehensive reversals of Donald Trump's policies upon his assumption of the Presidency. Such a big deal that he signed SEVENTEEN of them his very first day in office. Oftentimes, Biden's policy choices and decisions seem...
Our Afghan Whipping
Our Afghanistan project has failed. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has disintegrated, and as we leave, the Taliban fill the vacuum with breathtaking speed. What went wrong? The basic explanations are the only ones necessary. The first is that their holy book teaches...
Rancid Lemonade
Emperor Andrew I, the Petulant, who was actually showing signs of surviving his Triple-Lindy of scandals, resigned yesterday. The knockout punch was the release of New York State Attorney General Letitia James' 168 page report that provided credible evidence that...
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