Taki is just a trifle negative about today’s New York.

NEW YORK—In the dark she still looks good. The mystery and magnetism linger until dawn, and then you slowly see the lines and the harshness. Like a lady of the night who has smoked 10,000 cigarettes, the coming of the light is the enemy. New York ain’t what she used to be, that’s for sure. She’s a tired old place, with the upper-class vertical living gone to seed, and the honky-tonk fun side of the city gentrified and made boring. Michael Bloomberg as mayor did his best to ruin the glamour of the city, allowing glass behemoths to make the Chrysler Building, one of the world’s monuments to architectural brilliance, be buried amidst glass monstrosities. Bloomberg was and is a lowlife who knows how to count to 50 billion but couldn’t tell you Admiral Nelson’s Christian name if his miserable life depended on it. The present mayor, de Blasio, is a lowlife wop without the billions.

What happens in the sky is felt in the streets below. The once-exclusive Vanderbilt Avenue, where stores sold expensive tennis gear and hunting shotguns, is now a dark and dreary place, and just as well. The Vanderbilt was the hotel where the swells met—under the clock—since before Fitzgerald’s time and long past Taki’s. It was gone with the wind when Bloomberg types descended on the city like the northern jackals who went down south.

RTWT

Robert Curry contends that Progressives, after losing in 2016, resemble the East German government of 1953, unhappy with the uprising in East Germany, referenced in Berthold Brecht’s famous poem, looking to elect a different people.

The difference between today’s American Progs and the 1950s East German Nomenklatura being that our Progressives actually have a method of tinkering with the constituency of the electorate.

Die Lösung

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?

————————–

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Progressives have finally lost patience with the American people.

Until recently and on the whole they have been remarkably patient. From their beginning over a century ago, they have been quite far-sighted, keeping their eyes on the prize, always advancing their agenda while at the same time being careful not to unnecessarily alarm or clue in too many American voters. Their overall strategy is right there in the name they chose for their movement. For over 100 years, progressives have been transforming America persistently, progressively.

What makes their patience remarkable is that patience is not the hallmark of revolutionaries—and revolutionaries is what they are. The progressives’ revolutionary purpose is to reverse the outcome of the American Revolution, to overthrow the American system that is the gift of the Founders. You can call them the anti-American revolutionaries.

In the 20th century, there were three great attempts in the West to replace the social order created during the Enlightenment era. The Enlightenment era ultimately put the people in charge of the government. Each of the three movements born in the 20th century was an attempt to put the government back in charge of the people. The Germans and the Italians tried national socialism; the Russians and the Chinese tried Communism. Both brought ruin and catastrophe and then failed spectacularly.

The third attempt, the American one, is progressivism. The progressives have outlasted the other two. They were more clever and more patient than their two rivals. Realizing that the American people were not ripe for the kind of revolutionary upheaval that had worked in Germany or Russia, their plan was to introduce government control of the American people slowly or, if you like, progressively.

But the advent of Obama changed everything for them. The Obama phenomenon brought the American progressives’ to the peak of a frenzied enthusiasm. The Left understood that for the Democrats to nominate and for Americans to elect such a man to the presidency meant the long-anticipated final moment had arrived. Obama promised a “fundamental transformation” of America was at hand—and the Left went wild.

They threw caution to the wind. The Democrats pushed through Obamacare on a straight party-line vote, creating widespread voter alarm and galvanizing the Tea Party movement. Obama’s signal foreign policy initiative was to provide a life-saving gift to the mullahs in Iran. He lifted the sanctions on Iran, which in addition to giving the mullahs a new lease on life, also augmented that lease with direct foreign aid variously reported but in the neighborhood of $150 billion.

Back home, Obama and the Democrats required that schools allow boys who “identify as girls” to use the showers and dressing rooms set aside for girls. To the progressive elite, Obama in the White House meant the Democrats no longer needed to worry about alarming American voters.

The Tea Party was an early warning they ignored. And then there was Donald Trump. That the Republicans could nominate and America could elect such a man to the highest office in the land was understood by the Left to be an outrage, a crime against History. Trump’s election dashed the cup from their lips just as they were celebrating their long-awaited victory sip over the American founders.

Once upon a time, progressives would have re-calibrated and re-committed themselves to their long-term vision. That is what they used to do every time their dream of imposing socialized medicine on America—a goal cherished from the earliest days of the original Progressive era—failed.

But not this time. The Democrats are done with paying lip service to American ideals they do not believe in just so they can get elected. They have had it with the American people, and they have decided to replace us with people more to their liking, people who will never consider blocking their progressive agenda.

How can the Democrats be so certain that the floodtide of illegals they’ve chosen for this task can be counted upon to empower them? Could it be because those people are not exactly dedicated to the American idea, either?

These new people may not be able to mouth the progressive talking points against the Electoral College or argue for “the living Constitution” but, for the progressives, their hearts are in the right place and their votes will obediently follow their benefactors. That’s what counts.

It seems it was only yesterday when Barack Obama was saying illegal immigration was totally unacceptable. Today, the Democrats are all about open borders, abolishing ICE, and even socialized medicine for illegals.

What happened? The Democrats are done with waiting. They want what they have always wanted and, like the spoiled girl Veruca Salt in “Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory,” they want it now.

RTWT

E.M. Cadwaldr describes the culture of boundless negativity that is Progressivism.

To someone raised in a leftist family, the drill is all too familiar. There may be variations, but my experience went something like this:

One is immersed from birth in Marxist critical theory like a chicken cooking slowly in pot — not that one is ever told explicitly what Marxist critical theory is. In practice, the dogma is practiced as nothing more sophisticated than a lifestyle of continual dissatisfaction — of one long sad and negative discussion after another. The ideal setting for such discussions really has become the coffee shop — now a kind of secular parody of a church. There, one can ruminate, virtue signal to one’s fellow left-leaners, and sip slowly at the bitter cup of fair-trade, overpriced java picked by scenically depicted (but always comfortably far away) peasants from a third world hellhole du jour. If you miss the wafer normally offered in a more traditional sacrament, have a biscotti. One can tip the transgender barista graciously, earning a kind of progressive equivalent of merit, though not the least shred of actual grace. One can snub America simply by occupying the repackaged equivalent of a European institution. This is leftism by association.

The pilgrimage to the bookstore is another popular rite, though not compulsory. There, one finds all sorts of new and interesting topics to feel bad about. One can educate one’s sense of moral outrage, refining the palate to the subtler nuances of the same eternal whine. The vibrant Red whine: How bad western civilization is in general. The anti-American White whine: How bad America is in particular. All such reading fuels the same peculiarly self-destructive end. The progressive is taught to believe that an entirely unproductive and pathologically disheartened outlook is the mark of a superior being. Life is to be lamented from start to finish. Ordinary happiness is for the stupid. Such an ongoing narrative is as sticky and as lethal as a Venus fly trap. Try reading a little of the public intellectual Noam Chomsky. See how wonderfully acerbic and languid he is? Read a bit of the revisionist historian Howard Zinn. Such a blistering indictment of the West by a man who hasn’t troubled himself to examine any inconvenient historical data. Even a cursory study of leftist literature will make it plain to any conservative how leftists have developed an unspoken longing for cultural suicide. They have few or no children. They have no reason to be bothered if America is eventually transformed into just another Latin American failed state. They have been told their whole lives that it would serve us right.

RTWT

There is no limit to the absurd catastrophic alarms generated by the Environmental Religion. They are as many as there are grains of sand on the beach.

Here we have the BBC quoting a German academic telling us that the world may be running out of sand (!).

We extract billions of tonnes of sand and gravel each year to make concrete for the building industry, and this is having an increasing environmental impact as beaches and river beds are stripped, warn campaigners.

Alongside this environmental damage, the building industry is also a major contributor to greenhouse gases – cement manufacturing alone accounts for 7% of global CO2 emissions.

In many countries, sand is often extracted illegally from beaches or river beds. But once sand is taken from a river, the water flow can become faster and more violent – and the water table alongside a river will fall, affecting farming along the river bank.

Dredging beaches for sand increases coastal communities’ vulnerability to storm damage – because sandy beaches act as sponges absorbing a storm’s excess energy – something that is increasingly likely because of climate change.

“The problem is that the demand for sand is outpacing what we know about the environmental impact of extraction,” says Dr Aurora Torres of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). “It is a hidden ecological disaster.”

RTWT

The article threatening us with running out of stars in the sky is coming next week.

m

—————

His revolver is a 3rd Model Merwin & Hurlbert Double Action .44, made between 1883 and 1887, with Ivory grips.

click on image for larger version

P.G. Wodehouse did excellent take-offs on these.

US Army personnel playing baseball on Bougainville.

Some good stories from Werner Hermann on Quora:

During the Pacific war on the islands of Bougainville in the South Pacific, American and Japanese forces clashed with each other. The American invasion of the island was intended to be a mop-up operation to eliminate Japanese forces stationed there. Thanks to American air and naval superiority that made possible the island-hopping strategy, the operation on Bougainville was of little strategic value.

Consequently, in a bizarre and little known turn of event, neither side had any incentive to seek confrontation against each other, because the Japanese could not win and the Americans no longer needed to fight for total control of the island, the armies of both sides settled into a pattern of co-existence. This was when some strange and funny events occurred.

For example, in the 37th Division area, one infantryman recalled that at a company baseball game:
Someone noticed a raggedy-assed Jap way out in the shadows of the jungle off right field watching a game…. He came back for other games and was soon a rather regular fan… The 37th GIs figured “he can’t be all bad”; besides, he somehow managed to root for 37th teams, showing his approval of hits and runs for the home team!

In another event, a Japanese soldier infiltrated the US camp to watch movies. When a captured Japanese film showed the sinking of the USS Lexington, he gave himself away:

There suddenly came shouts of “Banzai! Banzai!” from the tangled but huge branches of a banyan tree on a near side of the row of seats… [he] was overcome with patriotism at the sight of his comrades in the air force sending an enemy ship to the bottom! He was pulled from the tree … Perhaps the last victim of the carrier Lexington.

ROTFLOL. Poor fellow. That guy should have known better to keep quiet when inside enemy-held territory. He could have saved himself.

Alphonse de Neuville, Count Roland Behaving Insensitively at Roncesvalles, 1894

AA:

STRASBOURG

Defaming the Prophet Muhammed “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace” and thus exceeds the permissible limits of freedom of expression, ruled the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday, upholding a lower court decision.

The decision by a seven-judge panel came after an Austrian national identified as Mrs. S. held two seminars in 2009, entitled “Basic Information on Islam,” in which she defamed the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage.

According to a statement released by the court on Thursday, the Vienna Regional Criminal Court found that these statements implied that Muhammad had pedophilic tendencies, and in February 2011 convicted Mrs. S. for disparaging religious doctrines.

She was fined €480 (aprox. $547) and the costs of the proceedings.

“Mrs. S. appealed but the Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision in December 2011, confirming, in essence, the lower court’s findings. A request for the renewal of the proceedings was dismissed by the Supreme Court on 11 December 2013,” it said.

“Relying on Article 10 (freedom of expression), Mrs. S. complained that the domestic courts failed to address the substance of the impugned statements in the light of her right to freedom of expression.”

On today’s ruling, the ECHR said it “found in particular that the domestic courts comprehensively assessed the wider context of the applicant’s statements and carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

The court held “that by considering the impugned statements as going beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate and classifying them as an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam, which could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace, the domestic courts put forward relevant and sufficient reasons.”

The statement also added that there had been no violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, covering freedom of expression.

How could you possibly oppose Brexit?