Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

hyvinglavin64 identifies Trump as Dio ( of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure): “An absurd cartoon. Loves gold. Seemingly impossible to defeat. Certain people of indeterminate irony will claim they “did nothing wrong.” (One notable difference: Dio, having built himself up from poverty rather than getting million dollar loans from dad, is actually the more cunning businessman).”

See all the others.

———————————————

Alfred E. Trump

David Harsanyi throws up his hands at watching voters in Republican primaries choosing Donald Trump as the conservative candidate in opposition to RINOs like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and Paul Ryan. We have to stop this kind of thing from happening again. We need some way to screen drunks and crazies out of the voting booth.

Never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many consequential decisions for the rest of us.

A person need only survey the inanity of the ongoing presidential race to comprehend that the most pressing problem facing the nation isn’t Big Business, Big Labor, Big Media or even Big Money in politics.

It’s you, the American voter. And by weeding out millions of irresponsible voters who can’t be bothered to learn the rudimentary workings of the Constitution, or their preferred candidate’s proposals or even their history, we may be able to mitigate the recklessness of the electorate.

No, we shouldn’t erect physical barriers to ballot access. Let’s purchase more voting machines, hire additional poll workers, streamline the registration process, mail out more ballots for seniors and produce more “Rock the Vote” ads imploring apathetic millennials to embrace their civic duty.

At the same time, let’s also remember that checking a box for the candidate whose campaign ads you like best is one of the most overrated obligations of the self-governed. If you have no clue what the hell is going on, you also have a civic duty to avoid subjecting the rest of us to your ignorance.

Unfortunately, we can’t trust you.

Now, if voting is a consecrated rite of democracy, as liberals often argue, surely society can have certain minimal expectations for those participating. And if citizenship itself is as hallowed as Republicans argue, then surely the prospective voter can be asked to know just as much as the prospective citizen. Let’s give voters a test. The citizenship civics test will do just fine.

Read the whole thing.

And let’s bring back the poll tax while we’re at it!

The Webley Mk V [Correction: Mark VI -thanks to Hammond Aikes] of 2nd Lieutenant J.R.R. Tolkien.

According to the Imperial War Museum,

Tolkien was an Oxford University student in 1914 but was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers soon after taking his degree in 1915. He joined the 11th Battalion of his regiment in France in June 1916, shortly before the Battle of the Somme. During the battle Tolkien served as the battalion signals officer. In late October 1916 he contracted trench fever and was sent back to England in early November. He spent most of the rest of the war convalescing. It was at this time that he began to write early versions of his Middle Earth stories. Debate continues regarding the extent to which Tolkien’s war experiences influenced his literary work.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, speculates that Obama’s own childhood traumatic experience is responsible for his Bathroom Edict.

At age ten, the child Barry Soetoro was sent by his biological mother from Jakarta, Indonesia to Hawaii, where his grandparents apparently handed him over to the care of a person of known and questionable character, his “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis. There is no known legal basis for this double transfer of parental responsibility. The mother and her husband remained in Indonesia so that legally, the child was abandoned by his legal parents. This is child neglect.

As far as is known, Frank Marshall Davis never legally adopted the ten-year-old child. Any family welfare worker would have raised serious questions about the legality and safety of Frank Marshall Davis becoming the sole adoptive parent. Davis was a hard-core Communist at the time, a party member. The Soviet Union, then under Nikita Khruschev and soon Leonid Brezhnev, posed a nuclear threat to the Western world. The Cold War was at its height. Davis was an obsessively enraged anti-white, anti-American individual, as shown in his newsletters and personal accounts. Davis wrote at least one pornographic pseudo-autobiography under the name Ben Green. He was an obsessive race-hater.

On the face of it, Barry’s mother, his grandparents, and Mr. Davis were guilty at least of child neglect. Psychologically, children who are passed around like this are often traumatically affected. Abandonment at a vulnerable age is said to inflict an emotional “wound” that may turn into narcissistic overcompensation. To make up for crushing feelings of personal rejection, a child may take refuge in grandiose and self-glorifying fantasies. Children who feel abandoned may seek sexualized relationships with adults to ensure that they will never be abandoned again.

Davis shows strong features of oppositional-defiant disorder, a compulsive need to break the boundaries of socially accepted behavior. For example, he allegedly took naked photos of Obama’s mother, dedicated his life to the Communist Party at a time when it was viewed as a threat to national survival, wrote passages involving pedophilia, and expressed his rage in racial terms. Davis mixed his obsessive racial anger with sexual provocation and revolutionary politics. He was not a fantasy revolutionary. He really hated those he considered enemies.

As an adult, Barack Obama shows many of the same psychological features. Other father figures in Obama’s life are also enraged, racially charged, and emotionally obsessive. Jeremiah Wright is an obvious example, but he is not the only one.

The important point is that the young Barry Soetoro lived with father figures who were consumed with racial hatred. When he briefly encountered his biological father in person and read his socialist writings, he was ready to idealize the image of Obama Sr. In fact, Obama Sr. joined the post-revolutionary regime of Jyomo Kenyatta, was soon expelled, apparently became alcoholic, and died under suspicious circumstances after two nearly identical car accidents.

All this should be irrelevant, but it is not – certainly not when the president of the United States issues decrees to our school systems that directly affect the psychological development of children.

The author doesn’t spell it out, but I expect he is referring slightly obliquely to the “Bathhouse Barry,” Obama-is-Gay theory, and blaming Obama’s covert sexual identity and partisan loyalty to LBGT causes on childhood molestation by the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.

Crocodylus niloticus

Orlando Sentinal:

Researchers have confirmed that three Nile crocodiles were captured near Miami, and they say it’s possible more of the man-eating reptiles are still out there, although no one can say for sure.

The big question now: How did they get to Florida?

“They didn’t swim from Africa,” University of Florida herpetologist Kenneth Krysko said. “But we really don’t know how they got into the wild.”

Krysko and his co-authors just published a paper showing that DNA testing proved the three animals captured in 2009, 2011 and 2014 are Nile crocs, a species whose males grow to over 16 feet long and weigh upward of 1,600 pounds.

Nile crocs are believed to be responsible for up to 200 fatalities annually in their native sub-Saharan Africa.

Maybe they’ll eat those Burmese Pythons.

Washington Post:

Chalkley took none of this seriously. Who would? As Wales Online described the inquest testimony, Chalkley “said she put the comment down to Mrs Sabine making it up, because she had heard nothing on the news which would tally with what she had said during their conversation.” After the telephone call, Chalkley said that death by stone amphibian — “Watch out or I will frog you” — became something of an in-joke among her family members. …

For 18 years, no one believed the woman who said she killed her husband with a stone frog. Then…
“It is beyond doubt in my mind,” a coroner concluded Thursday, “…that foul play was at the cause of his death.”

At Ricochet, the King Prawn is simultaneously pessimistic and consolatory.

Even by the time of the formal creation of the governmental structure employed in this nation we had already started on a long downward slope, pulled inevitably through decline and toward destruction by the great weight of human nature. This trend should come as no surprise to conservatives because we have studied history. We know that from the pinnacle of our founding everything else would be downhill. At the close of the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin said:

In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

The cry for socialism and despotism has been long coming, but not unforeseen. The problem for Franklin wasn’t that we had created an inadequate government but rather we would become an inadequate people. He was right. He looked to the past and saw what had gone before, then looking to the future he foretold what would be the fate of this nation.

While arguing in favor of our new form of government even its most ardent supporters feared the havoc which would be wreaked by those entrusted with power. As James Madison stated it in Federalist 51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. [emphasis mine]

We could imagine the founders would be shocked if they saw the state of our nation and our people today, but I doubt they would find it so surprising that we proved them wholly correct. Government is a reflection of human nature, and the government we have (and are about to get) reflects perfectly the character of those who inhabit this nation and make up a majority of the votes cast. We elected a despot with his pen and his phone because we’ve become incapable of electing any other kind of leader. In a few short months we’ll elect another, only this time our choices are limited to an even more corrupt and criminal politician or a conman who promises to be an even more effective despot than the last. Neither candidate sees as the problem the concentration of power in one branch or one person. They believe the only flaw is the concentration of power in the wrong person.

I said in the beginning that conservatism acts as merely an anchor. Some may see the nation foundering on the rocks of human nature and believe that conservatism has failed. It has not. In any other time or place the crash would have come sooner, the destruction more violently, the catastrophe more severe. We’ve done the job well, and we will continue to do what we can until the whole thing comes apart, or until the chain breaks and we lie useless on the bottom as the nation sails unhindered across the seas of time to its inevitable end.

Read the whole thing.

Roderick Spode — Donald Trump

Ben Schott, in the Spectator, imagines The Man of the Hour putting in an appearance in the World of P.G. Wodehouse. Trump inevitably reminds Bertie of Roderick Spode.

I sat alone at breakfast, forking my E and B …, when a haircut burst into the room closely followed by a bovine gentleman the colour of turmeric.

‘Ah, you must be Worcestershire! Your uncle Tom has told me all about you.’

‘It’s Wooster, actually, but call me Bertie, everyone does.’

‘And you can call me The Donald,’ barked Trump, setting about the breakfast dishes like a haystack in search of a needle.

Hat tip to Sarah Hoyt.