Systemic Rot – from Texas to California

Posted on March 1, 2021 by leslie

Race IQ Sketch

Systemic Rot – from Texas to California

Ilana Mercer is twixt fire and flood

Some blame a quasi-free-market in electricity for the collapse of the electrical grid in Texas, during a winter snow storm, mid-February, in which temperatures hovered at 0°F (or -18°C). The same people finger deregulation and isolation from the national and neighboring grids. Opposing opinion has it that an excessive reliance on renewable energy sources, like wind turbines, was the culprit in a grid collapse that saw 40 percent of the power supply fail within hours of the storm, indirectly causing the death of about 60 Texans. All agree that the oil-and-gas state enjoys both cheap natural gas and abundant wind power, and that its natural resources could have stood Texas in good stead.

The Lone Star State’s human resources are another matter. Be they wind turbines or gas pipelines, the electrical grid has to be properly maintained. Texas, however, lacked “leadership.” It transpires that the grid had not been weatherized or winterized in anticipation of a harsh winter—pipelines had not been insulated and wind turbines never deiced. Leadership is a euphemism for intelligence. Texas in the winter of 2021 will likely be looked upon as a case of systemic stupidity, systemic rot. Continue reading →

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Still Addicted to that Rush

Posted on February 21, 2021 by leslie

President Trump with Rush Limbaugh

Still Addicted to that Rush

Ilana Mercer, on the late king of radio

Rush Limbaugh died on February the 17th. In the encomiums to conservatism’s radio king, mention was made of his 2009 address at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. CPAC for short, or CPUKE before Trump.

“Addicted to that Rush,” the March 6, 2009 column’s title, came not from Rush’s brief addiction to painkillers following surgery, but from an eponymous hit by the band Mr. Big. (It, in turn, came from a time when the American music scene produced not pornographers like Cardi B, but musicians like Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan). Nevertheless, that title alluded to one of Rush’s missed opportunities: speaking against a war into which he was involuntarily drafted and by which he was almost destroyed: the War on Drugs.

Still, how petty does that war, in all its depredations, seem now! How unimaginably remote do the issues Rush spoke to, in 2009, seem in the light of a country that has come a cropper in the course of one year, due to an unprecedented consolidation of state power around COVID, compounded by an amped up, institutionalized campaign against white America. And, in particular, against white Trump voters. Continue reading →

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Rattus Republicanus

Posted on February 14, 2021 by leslie

Gulliver’s Travels, credit Wikipedia

Rattus Republicanus

by Ilana Mercer

The defining difference between Democrats and Republicans is this: Republicans live on their political knees. They apologize and expiate for their principles, which are generally not unsound. Democrats, conversely and admirably, stand tall for their core beliefs, as repugnant as these mostly are.

The Left most certainly didn’t rush forward to condemn the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riffraff, as they looted and killed their way across urban America, last year. Instead, Democrats defended the déclassé, criminal arm of their party. “Riots are the language of the unheard,” they preached, parroting MLK.

What of the trammels of despair that drove the Trump protesters of January 6? Trust too many Republicans—goody two-shoes, teacher’s-pet types all—to trip over one another in order to denounce that ragtag of disorganized renegades, the protesters aforementioned, who already have no chance in hell of receiving due process of law. Continue reading →

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The Walls of Jericho

Posted on February 11, 2021 by leslie

Salt’s Mill

The Walls of Jericho

Bill Hartley blows his trumpet

Since the nineteenth century the expansion of our cities has seen settlements on the outskirts absorbed into the urban area. Occasionally though a town avoids this trend and manages to retain a distinct character. Topography can sometimes play a part in allowing this to happen and there is a good example to be found in the Yorkshire Pennine country.

Not everyone would favour living on an exposed site more than 1200 feet above sea level. This is a location which still carries a sense of isolation, even though it overlooks the City of Bradford. The railways never made it here, being defeated by the gradient. Closest was the old Great Northern Railway which climbed to some impressive heights on its network but was defeated by Queensbury, now part of the Bradford Metropolitan District. The station lay 400 feet below the town. Here, up to the 1960s, stood one of the strangest examples of railway architecture, a triangular station built that way to accommodate three lines which needed to find their way around the hills. Because the valley bottom sites had been taken by other lines they were known to train crews as the Alpine Route. Continue reading →

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When Kyle Came to Kenosha (2)

Posted on February 7, 2021 by leslie

A Kyle Rittenhouse supporter in Kenosha, credit Wikipedia

When Kyle came to Kenosha (2)

by Ilana Mercer

I’m not even sure one can still speak freely about theoretical matters. Nevertheless, against the background din of “insurrection” charges against MAGA America, I’ve tried to distill the hardcore libertarian take regarding the storming of the Capitol Building, on January 6, in a brief YouTube clip.

https://youtu.be/e90VaSh1GHE

It is very plainly this: principled libertarians will distinguish pro-Trump patriots such as Kyle Rittenhouse from the armed wing of the Democratic Party: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other criminal riffraff. BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their livelihoods and businesses, doing billions in damages. In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Once!

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by BLM troops (the Democratic Party’s violent militia), some of the staunchest of conservatives have asserted that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.” Principled libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical property-rights libertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the Trump-blaming conservatives. A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the well-padded seats of state power and corruption. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, February 2021

Posted on February 4, 2021 by leslie

Bird of paradise, credit Wikipedia

ENDNOTES, February 2021

In this edition: Entente Musicale, new releases of English and French music from SOMM; Kathleen Ferrier, remembered; Messiaen and 20th-century piano music from Divine Art, reviewed by Stuart Millson

A musical entente cordiale is presented in splendid sound this month, courtesy of the ever-enterprising SOMM CD label; a disc which features the virtuosity of two first-class and thoughtful performers of the younger generation, Clare Howick (violin) and Simon Callaghan (piano) – both searching, it seems, for a fusion of the flowering of authentic national voices in music, from England and France in the early 20th century.

France is represented chiefly by Debussy’s valedictory Violin Sonata dating from the end of the Great War – although one might also include Frederick Delius in the French category, for the English-born bohemian spent his last years in the seclusion of the countryside of Grez-sur-Loing. Clare Howick brings both detail and pathos to her interpretation of Delius’s Violin Sonata in B major (op. Posth), especially in the Andante middle movement. Thoughts arise of summer or early-autumn air with insects and birds galore; of overgrowing, untamed garden vegetation and the decaying colours of flowers and occasional traces of their once-strong scents. Continue reading →

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Sappho of Lesbos

Posted on February 4, 2021 by leslie

Sappho of Lesbos

by Darrell Sutton

John William Godward, In the Days of Sappho

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace
Byron

Byron had a strong affection for Lucan’s Pharsalia. His attachment to Aeschylus’s Prometheus was equally pronounced. Acquainted with the classical tongues, bi-lingual editions of Greek and Latin texts were commonplace. His poems illuminate his penchants. He preferred the territories and literature of ancient Greece to its modern terrestrial forms. The ‘Isles of Greece’, though nationalistic in tone, is imbued with nostalgia. From a distance of two thousand years, Byron roamed the ruins of Greece daily by means of its preserved treasury of writings, and this he accomplished without a great fondness for their contemporary scenery. To quote his own words:

Let Aberdeen and Elgin still pursue
The shade of fame through regions of virtu;
Waste useless thousands on their Phidian freaks,
Mis-shapen monuments, and maimed antiques;
And make their grand saloons a general mart
For all the mutilated blocks of art.

Byron had other appetites. Had the public known of them, his reputation would have been sullied. These cravings came and went. Whether they were enabling or inhibiting factors of his poetic prowess is a matter for his critics. But clearly, select authors of classical Greece retained a permanent place in his heart throughout his life. Continue reading →

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Automatic for the People

Posted on January 30, 2021 by leslie

2nd Amendment Rally, Jan 20th 2020, Richmond, Virginia, credit Wikipedia

Automatic for the People

by Ilana Mercer

When Uncle Sam threatens some blighted and benighted region of the world—ostensibly on behalf of the American People and for their own good—our representatives call it peace through strength. It is then that ordinary Americans are encouraged to pipe up in praise of the State’s invariably Orwellian peace-through-strength strategies.

Peace through strength on our front porches, while being menaced by lowbrow looters and assorted louts? For that you can be incarcerated in the land where the criminal roams free. And when practiced by pale faces, our Second Amendment rights, exercised on the perimeter of our properties, as we stand vigil against the vilest of human beings—that’s tantamount to white supremacy and privilege. Witness the fate of some courageous home owners (the McCloskeys of St. Louis, Missouri) exercising age-old rights—also American constitutional rights—when they ventured out onto their verandas with firearms, intending to stand their ground and deter mobs from overrunning hearth and home.

Good people standing their ground were libeled and charged as criminals. Since these home owners did nothing illicit in the natural law, state authorities had to cunningly conjure charges against their naturally licit stance of deterrence. Law-abiding Americans who practiced deterrence, or peace through strength, have all-too-often been prosecuted by a justice system characterized by institutional rot. Continue reading →

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Ominous Stirrings in the World of Woke

Posted on January 27, 2021 by leslie

Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Bibel in Bildern, credit Wikipedia

Ominous Stirrings in the World of Woke

by David Ashton

The ideology of “equality, diversity, inclusion”, which some call “Wokeism”[i], is spreading into every nook and cranny of our national life. Perceptive observers compare it to a new “faith”[ii], recently adjunct to Black Lives Matter militancy. It has no formal creed, unlike traditional Christianity or orthodox Islam but its adherents and missionaries repeat the requisite jargon better than neophytes of yesteryear Sunday School and, sadly, with deeper psychological internalization than thought-reform penitents of Communist China. Some converts seem almost deranged[iii] and invoke as their icon an African-American criminal “martyred” in dubious circumstances[iv].

Who are these “engineers of the human soul” (to quote Stalin)? Conveniently, in a pull-out section, the New Statesman has illustrated the “equitable future”[v] in store for the hapless inhabitants of these isles by quoting several woke supporters. Commencing with the ridiculous statistical complaint that the current pandemic has exposed such “underlying inequalities” as that half of “black, Asian and ethnic minority” women are worried about their work prospects, the magazine advocates proactive plans for “equality of gender, race, disability and class”. Continue reading →

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Storming the Citadels of Statism

Posted on January 24, 2021 by leslie

John Martin, Belshazzara’s Feast, credit Wikipedia

Storming the Citadels of Statism

by Ilana Mercer 

Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus. BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses. Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—sometimes forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms.

These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves. In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Yet, despite the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, have concluded, in error, that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters. Continue reading →

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