Archive for August, 2017
14 Aug 2017

Removing Confederate Monuments in 2017

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Why would anyone want to attack the political choices and public careers of people who lived a century and a half ago? The Civil War is over. The cause of Southern Independence was defeated. Slavery was extinguished. The actual Northern soldiers who fought the Confederates on the field met with them amicably at reunions years later and shook hands. There is a video of a Gettysburg Reunion that shows elderly Yankees atop Cemetery Ridge cheering old white-haired Confederate veterans re-enacting Pickett’s Charge. A national consensus emerged after the war, that recognized that Southerners had their own honestly-held, honorable point of view in the conflict, and that their bravery and sacrifices deserved the respect of their opponents. Recently, the rancid radical Left has decided to try to overturn that consensus, as a grand masturbatory exercise in historical self-righteousness and to flatter the amour propre and fan the grievances of its dependent black clientele. This is a shoddy and divisive game, dishonorable and violative of our shared American history.

14 Aug 2017

Charlottesville: The Left, not the Alt-Right, Was to Blame

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No police intervention occurred even when black ANTIFA counter-demonstrators used aerosol flame-throwers.

My various left-wing correspondents are all energized by the violence in Charlottesville, and are demanding that those of us on the Right take the blame, apologize, and get busy denouncing all those racists and White Supremacists.

It’s sad to see left-right violence, including pepper spray and baseball bats, on American streets, reminding us all a bit of Weimar Germany. But it was obviously not the Conservative Movement, not even the Alt-Right, that brought about these kinds of poisonous national divisions, that fostered all the chauvinistic identity politics, and that provoked the violence.

Our friends on the Left are demanding that we denounce all the demonstrators protesting the removal of the Lee Statue and that we agree to identify all of them as “White Supremacists” and dismiss their motivations as “racism.” There were clearly some fringe group crazies participating in the demonstrations and some unsavory people were present, but that doesn’t make everyone who demonstrated a Nazi, a Klan member, or a White Supremacist.

I don’t recall any time I have ever heard our friends on the Left denouncing the most extreme communist radicals responsible for violence. Actually, they offer excuses, blame the anger of their radical extremists on America and the rest of us, and when their bomb-building murderers get out of jail, they give them teaching positions at universities.

So, sorry, I have no intention of identifying the generality of demonstrators as White Supremacists. I think they were mostly normal people defending their regional and cultural identity, who had been at last pushed too far, who were finally fed up with being insulted and marginalized.

I don’t think most people there had any connection at all to the crazy person from Ohio who drove his car into the counter-demonstrators or to the zanies carrying Swastika flags. And it seems obvious to me that left-wing local and state government took a partisan role, instructing state and city police to stand aside and let ANTIFA thugs intimidate and rough up the demonstrators trying to defend the monument.

The Left, today, is playing its usual propaganda games, trying to stigmatize and shame the opposition, but I think they fail to understand that they’ve been using the same tactics and techniques too long. The Alt-Right is reading Saul Alinsky, too. Their pet media has lost credibility with much of the country, and a lot of us are just completely tired of having the Left play the Race Card.

13 Aug 2017

Police Took Leftists’ Side in Charlottesville

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Erection of Lee Monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1924

VDare claims the police were on ANTIFA’s side.

[T]he police did not protect demonstrators from Antifa and did little to prevent confrontations. Attendees of the demonstration, rather than walking a clear path to the park, were instead forced to walk through a line of screaming protesters. Liberal clergyman and elderly women held signs about “peace” and “love” and smiled benevolently—as violent Leftist protesters attacked from the crowd. They are as culpable as the Antifa themselves for the violence unleashed.

But that was not close to the worst. Demonstrators did not need protection from Antifa. All the police would have had to do to ensure a safe demonstration was simply go home—which is what happened in Berkeley. Patriots equipped with shields, inured to Antifa tactics of throwing bricks and spraying mace, had secured Lee Park (excuse me, “Emancipation Park”) and may indeed have outnumbered both Antifa and counter-demonstrators in terms of pure numbers. Several were armed, and the city fathers should be offering Unite The Right activists tearful tributes for the latter’s saint-like restraint in not opening fire despite more than justified provocation.

If police had done nothing, the public would have been safer. Instead, unforgivably, the police attacked (not dispersed—attacked) the legal demonstration, threatening attendees with arrest if they stayed in Lee Park.

Then activists, totally unprotected by police, were deliberately funneled into a gauntlet of attacking Communists, in a kind of Kill Zone. Injuries on both sides were predictable. (Of course, much like cuckservatives who bow and scrape to the Main Stream Media, the police were then insulted by the Communists for their trouble.

This could have been a relatively stable situation: a patriot demonstration protected by its own shield wall (and ideally, by police who actually did their job) along with a separate group of Leftist protesters, with both groups enjoying the right to free speech supposedly guaranteed them by the Constitution.

Instead, the police precipitated a running battle which engulfed all of Charlottesville. The result: Antifa running wild and chasing down isolated pockets of Unite The Right attendees as the latter defended themselves as best they could, with bystanders were caught in the melee. Police showed no interest in doing anything other than threatening patriots with arrests for “unlawful assembly.”

In contrast, of course, Leftists were free to disobey the laws and marched merrily down the streets, many chanting “Black Lives Matter!”, causing chaos as they went. As Rebel Media’s Faith Goldy reported, this was an absurd “double standard.” Anarcho-Tyranny was the order of the day in C-Ville.

I don’t look upon VDare as an unimpeachable source, but we are not going to find a lot of descriptions of yesterday’s violence sympathetic to the demonstrators trying to defend the statue. It does make sense that the police would be on counter-demonstrators’ side, they are working for the same City Council that renamed the park and that voted to remove the statue of General Lee.

RTWT

12 Aug 2017

What is Kim’s Strategy?

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Slate interviews B.R. Myers, a regional expert, about what North Korea is really trying to accomplish with all the saber-rattling and provocations.

The stars are aligning very nicely for the strategy [Kim Jong-Un] inherited from his father. Just as North Korea is perfecting its nuclear weaponry, China has acquired the economic power to punish South Korea for improving its missile defenses. Opinion polls in the South now strongly favor the left-wing presidential candidate Mun Jae-in, who in 2011 expressed hope for the speedy realization of a North–South confederation. If he or anyone else from the nationalist left takes over, years of South Korean accommodation of the North will ensue, complete with massive unconditional aid.

This went on under George W. Bush, and the alliance survived. Donald Trump, however, is much less likely to allow an ostensible ally to subvert UN sanctions while paying tributary visits to Pyongyang. And Kim Jong-un knows this. He knows that whatever security guarantees Trump gave to Seoul were made to the current conservative administration only. So Kim Jong-un has a better chance than his father did of pressuring the alliance to a breaking point. With China’s support he can pull a left-wing South Korean administration in one way while pushing the Americans in another.

Having lived in South Korea for the past 15 years, I don’t share most Americans’ confidence that it will always choose America over a North-supporting China. My own impression—bolstered by the ongoing controversy surrounding the stationing of the THAAD missile defense system—is that a growing number of South Koreans would rather see their state’s security compromised than risk their own prosperity.

Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate. The most popular movie in Seoul at the moment is a thriller about a joint North–South effort to catch a criminal ring of North Korean defectors. That plot tells you something right there. The main North Korean character is played for cool by a handsome Tom Cruise type, while his South Korean counterpart is a homely, tired-looking figure of fun. There is a tradition of this sort of casting. The subtext: Serving the North is glamorous; serving the South, not so much. Let’s keep in mind that Kim Jong-un is watching these movies too.

[W]e must stop focusing on short-term shifts and nuances in North Korean propaganda and instead grasp the fundamental consistency its ideology has maintained since 1945. We have to take that ideology seriously, however absurd the personality cult may seem. To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place.

Were Kim Jong-un to share our own leader’s love of slogan caps, his would read: Make Korea Whole Again. Unification is not just central to the North’s ideology, but the only sure and lasting solution to its security problem. That makes the nuclear crisis all that more difficult to solve. But we will never get anywhere if we don’t face up to the true and frightening nature of the North’s goals. For decades our politicians and cartoonists have mocked North Korean leaders as squalling babies who wave missiles around just to get our attention. We’re the ones who need to grow up.

RTWT

12 Aug 2017

Steve Jobs vs. Sundar Pichai

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12 Aug 2017

T Shirt

HT: Karen L. Myers.

11 Aug 2017

Global Warming Hallelujah

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HT: Vanderleun.

11 Aug 2017

PC Vandalism to Architecture of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale

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Yale Alumni Mag:

If you were especially observant during your years on campus, you may have noticed a stone carving by the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library that depict a hostile encounter: a Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American (top). When the library decided to reopen the long-disused entrance as the front door of the new Center for Teaching and Learning, says head librarian Susan Gibbons, she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces decided the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” The Puritan’s musket was covered over with a layer of stone (bottom) that Gibbons says can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving.

HT: Instapundit.

11 Aug 2017

The Inevitable Comment

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HT: Karen L. Myers.

10 Aug 2017

Grand Canyon 1880

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A tourist leans over to get a view of the Grand Canyon, 1880.

10 Aug 2017

Diplomatic Message

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09 Aug 2017

Right!

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NYT:

WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. It was uploaded to a nonprofit internet digital library in January but received little attention until it was published by The New York Times.

RTWT

Is that so? How very, very odd.

All over America, ordinary people think that the weather varies dramatically by region, that we’ve all seen warmer summmers years ago than any recently, and that the weather in recent years has been different from year to year but in no way strikingly unusual.

I guess you have to be a Climate Scientist, a New York Times editor, or a community of fashion member of the Establishment to be equipped with the kinds of privileged insights and hyper-sensitive sensory organs that can detect those effects of climate change, along with extraordinary educational training enabling you to predict dramatic weather effects far off in the misty future. The rest of us, even the ordinary people meteorologists, can only imperfectly predict the weather a week or two in advance.

Myself, I guess I must have been not paying attention at Yale, because I find myself completely at a loss when I attempt to sit down and try to define exactly at what point we find ourselves today along the Interglacial Cycle. I must have slept in the morning when they explained what exactly causes Glaciation and the whole cycle of earth’s warming and cooling and how you can tell just where on the cycle we should be and exactly what proper normal climate conditions would be like.

Isn’t it wonderful that there are all these people so much smarter than the rest of us, who know all these things, and who are able to define precisely what the earth’s normal climate would look like and who can measure accurately the negative impact of mankind’s pernicious productive activities and, on top of all that, predict for us all their terrible, terrible consequences?

Me, I’m a bit uncertain at what point later this afternoon a thunderstorm is likely to arrive, and I’m as likely as not to get rained on when I go out to pick up the mail.

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