The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Democrats Kill Each Other in Baltimore; Mayor Blames … Texas, Florida, Alabama?

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | 1 Comment

In 2020, Brandon Scott was elected mayor of Baltimore with more than 70% of the vote in a city whose per-capita violent crime rate (2,027 per 100,000 residents) is nearly twice as high as Chicago (1,099). There’s no sign that this carnage will abate anytime soon:

Investigators in Baltimore are searching for multiple suspects in a mass shooting that turned a beloved annual neighborhood block party into chaos early Sunday, killing two people and injuring 28 others, most of whom were teens, officials said.
The search for the shooters – investigators believe at least two were involved in the incident – is ongoing, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN Monday, vowing, “We will not rest until we find those who cowardly decided to shoot up this block party and carry out acts of violence which we know will be illegal guns.” . . .
The gunfire erupted early Sunday in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, where community members were enjoying a yearly celebration dubbed Brooklyn Day.
Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18 . . . and Kylis Fagbemi, 20, were fatally shot, the Baltimore Police Department announced.
The dozens of surviving victims all sustained gunshot wounds, according to acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley. Five of those injured were adults aged 20 or older and the remaining 23 were teenagers ranging in age from 13 to 19, police said.
Seven of the wounded remain in hospitals, with four in critical condition and three in stable condition, the mayor noted.
Investigators are scouring the sprawling crime scene – which spans several blocks – for evidence and are poring over hours of surveillance footage, the police commissioner said. Officials have also urged community members to come forward with any relevant information or video footage that may assist in the investigation.
A reward for information leading to the capture of the suspects has been raised to $28,000, Worley said at a news conference Monday.

While police have provided no description of the shooters, my hunch is that they’re probably not Trump supporters, IYKWIMAITYD. But this didn’t stop the mayor from trying to shift the blame:

“Mayor Scott, you said this year alone Baltimore PD confiscated 1,300 illegal weapons. Do you have a sense of where guns are coming from, the sort of illegal supply of guns are coming from into the city?” CNN anchor Audie Cornish asked.
“These guns come into Maryland – I want to be very clear about this – because Maryland has gun laws that actually have an impact. We have a ghost gun ban, which is why you see those numbers coming down. But these weapons come from Virginia. They come from Texas. They come from Florida. They come from Alabama. They come from everywhere in this country,” the mayor replied, blaming guns and not thugs for the carnage.
“Here we are dozens of years later, decades later at this point and we’re still dealing with mass shootings because of the inaction to deal with this issue on a national level. This can no longer be an issue that falls to the feet of local police, local elected officials or state governments,” Scott continued, seeming to suggest a larger crackdown on firearms on a national level is needed.

It’s not the people of Baltimore — the ones who elected Brandon Scott as their mayor — who are to blame, it’s those out-of-state guns! See, the citizens of Baltimore are all innocent angels, and their city would be a peaceful utopia, were it not for those bad people in other states — Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama — who refuse to “deal with this issue on a national level.” The CNN audience actually believes this absurd excuse, because their entire worldview would collapse if they ever stopped to think that perhaps the kind of people who vote for Democrats are anything other than virtuous. No CNN viewer would ever consider the possibility that the citizens of Baltimore are less virtuous than the people of Florida, who reelected Gov. Ron DeSantis in a landslide.



 

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Maryland

The Consequences of Demonic Influence

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | Comments Off on The Consequences of Demonic Influence

The Huffington Post unloaded an 8,000-word feature about a transgender person calling herself/“himself” Renton Sinclair. Perhaps your first reaction to this is to ask, “The Huffington Post still exists?” Yeah, I was surprised, too. In 2011, Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL for $315 million. In 2015, Verizon paid $4.4 billion for AOL. then in 2021, Verizon sold HuffPo to BuzzFeed in a stock swap whose value could most likely be described as “pennies on the dollar” of what Huffington sold it for 10 years earlier. BuzzFeed immediately started cutting HuffPo staff.

So much for the story of the dwindling footprint of HuffPo. As for this exhaustingly long feature about Renton Sinclair, why? What was the journalistic objective of HuffPo senior reporter Christopher Mathias in spending so much time telling Renton’s story? The idea seems to be to present this person as the sympathetic “poster boy” victimized by a “right-wing culture war,” as Mathias describes the backlash against the Transgender Cult. Sinclair is the daughter of Tania Joy Gibson, who has become an outspoken opponent of transgenderism, and Mathias portrays Gibson as a “Crazy Church Lady” type, associated with “a coalition of Christian dominionists determined to reshape America according to a far-right, fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.”

A major “hook” for this story — the selling point of the narrative — is that Gibson is a former beauty pageant winner, who competed as Miss Illinois in the 1996 Miss America contest. And one could imagine how, perhaps, being the daughter of a former beauty queen might present difficulties, pressure to follow in mommy’s footsteps, to live up to a certain ideal or whatever. So this information may be relevant as an explanatory factor in Renton Sinclair’s gender identity issues. However, the more obvious and mundane explanations are impossible to overlook:

Renton was 8 when his parents divorced, and he struggled with depression thereafter. His mom sent him to therapy and put him on meds, but nothing seemed to help ease a profound despair and anxiety that had grown inside him, feelings he could never quite identify the origins of and which intensified with puberty. “A lot of it was just internally like feeling terrible about myself and just not really knowing why,” he recalls.
He didn’t have much of a frame of reference for being queer — save for a couple of gay men he saw serving on pageant boards with his mom — but he suspected he probably was. “What’s worse is my whole sexuality issue,” he wrote in his journal once. “I can’t decide if I’m homo or bi.”
Then, when he was about 12, one of Renton’s favorite YouTubers, an anime cosplayer named twinfools, posted a video announcing that he was transgender. . . .
Renton found refuge in an online network of queer youth on sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt. He started going by the name Axel with this online coterie — a name adapted from a male character in the video game “Kingdom Hearts” — and eventually set up a secret Facebook account where he could try on this new identity.
He and his new friends confided in each other and talked about being queer. At one point, Renton felt comfortable enough offline to come out to some friends at a Bible camp in Wisconsin. “I told two friends about my LGBT stuff,” he wrote in his journal.
But the depression only deepened. On Dec. 22, 2011, Renton tried to kill himself by overdosing on Tylenol.

This tale — family problems, mental health issues, social-media influence — is so familiar as to be stereotypical of transgender teens in the 21st century. A depressed girl with divorced parents and sexuality issues, addicted to YouTube and Tumblr, creating a fake male online persona named for a character in a video game and pretending to be a boy on Facebook? It’s a cliché. Remember all those crazy SJW Tumblrina feminists I used to make fun of? Practically all of them were “queer” in one way or another, and universally they listed their mental illnesses — bipolar, PTSD, whatever — in their Tumblr profiles.

Adolescence is always an emotionally turbulent time, and everybody has to find some way of coping with the stresses involved. Smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin were among the most popular coping mechanisms when I was a teenager. Nowadays, getting lost in online media — video games, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. — seems to have replaced nodding off to “Kashmir” in a haze of marijuana fumes as the popular teenage habit, and I’m far from certain it’s an improvement.

But what about the influence of . . . Satan?

In the HuffPo article, Mathias makes a point of treating Tania Joy Gibson’s religious beliefs and practices as self-evidently absurd, e.g., when she puts her daughter into psychiatric treatment:

Renton says his mom and stepdad had discovered he’d been cutting himself. Moreover, his stepdad had gone on Renton’s computer and found the “Axel” Facebook account. He and Tania read through his messages about being queer.
“They freaked the fuck out,” Renton recalls. . . .
One day they told Renton they needed to stop by the hospital so Tania could get a blood test. But while waiting in the lobby, it became clear to Renton that it was a ruse: “I saw a sign saying ‘adolescent inpatient psychiatric’ or some shit, and I was just like, ‘God damn it, here we fucking go.’”
Renton says they kept him there for a week. Sometimes Tania visited with a pastor, the pair loudly praying over Renton in the visitor’s room and speaking in tongues — the practice, popular in certain charismatic evangelical churches, of harnessing a supernatural ability to speak in an unknown, divine language. (To nonbelievers, however, it can sound like gibberish.)
Tania would also bring Christian counselors for therapy sessions, Renton says, during which they’d sit in a room reading Bible verses and telling Renton that being queer was wrong. It was only years later that he realized this was conversion therapy.
“I don’t think the goal was necessarily to make people straight or whatever as much as it was just to, like, repress you to the point where you either just die or you just stop arguing with it,” Renton remembers.
Renton eventually was allowed to spend nights at home, but he claims he spent daytime hours when he should have been at school at the psychiatric facility. He was still forbidden from seeing friends, even the kids next door. Renton remembers his grandmother, Tania’s mom, telling him over and over that there was a war over his soul between angels and demons.

Consider this possibility: GRANDMA WAS RIGHT!

The phenomenon of “cutting” (self-harm) immediately calls to mind the Gadarene demoniac who spent his time “in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” When Jesus confronted the “unclean spirit” that had possessed the man and asked the demon’s name, the reply was: “My name is Legion: for we are many.” And then Jesus sent the demonic spirit (or spirits) into a herd of pigs, “and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea” (Mark 5:1-20).

Maybe you don’t believe that, but for those of us who do, there are several lessons that can be learned from studying this Bible passage, including the fact that Satan’s influence is destructive, which is why the victim of demonic possession engages in self-destructive behavior.

That Renton’s grandma would see her behavior as evidence of spiritual warfare is only controversial to non-believers. Most Christians aren’t into that charismatic speaking-in-tongues kind of thing, but anyone who views the Bible as the Word of God must acknowledge that demonic possession is a real thing. You can see evidence of it lots of places, if you know what you’re looking for (e.g., “‘Feminist Witchcraft,’ Mental Illness and the Demonic Dangers of the Occult,” Feb. 21, 2017). Some years ago, I read An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels by Father Gabriele Amorth, who was often called the Vatican’s chief exorcist, and offers this explanation (pp. 72-73):

Diabolical obsessions are disturbances or extremely strong hallucinations that the demon imposes, often invincibly, on the mind of the victim. In these cases, the person is no longer a master of his own thoughts. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices . . . as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide or to do evil to others and, particularly in the young, it can lead to confusion about one’s gender.

See, it’s not just me pointing out this connection. However, in an age of spiritual ignorance, most people are not cognizant of the dangers of demonic influences, and tend to ridicule anyone who takes such dangers seriously when discussing, for example, Ellen “Elliot” Page.

“Symptomatic evidence of demonic possession,” I called it, and I suppose most readers took this as merely more of my habitual sarcasm, but was I really just joking? When people engage in self-destructive behavior and claim to be hearing voices, whose voice are they hearing?

So HuffPo spent 8,000 words celebrating Renton Sinclair as a victim of “right-wing” Christianity, when I think it far more likely that she/“he” is a victim of Satanic forces which are everywhere in this dark age.



 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

Rule 5 Sunday: Elisabeth Giolito

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Instagram model Elisabeth (Lis) Giolito was born on May 26 1996, (which would make her 27) and also does professional modeling through Tricia Brink Management.
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ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Leftists In America Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, MAGA – The Part Of Lavrenti Beria is Played By Jack Smith, Indiana Jones & The Destruction Of Destiny, Jack Ryan (Final Season),  Blade Runner 1929, “Queen Victoria”, A Cholesterol-Lowering Alternative To Statins? and Asteroid City

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Ashley Kolfage, Fish Pic Friday – Alesia Halliday, Thursday Tanlines, Gone Fishin’, The Wednesday Wetness, Is Garland Impeachment Coming?, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, So Who’s Telling the Truth, the Whistleblower or AG Garland? and Palm Sunday

FLAPPR: T.I.T.S. for June 30

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Category: Rule 5

We Survived Thunder Bird Falls

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | Comments Off on We Survived Thunder Bird Falls

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON
When my son told us we were going for a hike Saturday, my first thought was, “We’re going to get eaten by bears.” A quick Google search (“thunder bird falls + grizzly bear”) turned up several results, including a recent story with this quote:

“Bear encounters can happen anywhere in Anchorage, in Alaska,” Fish and Game Assistant Area Biologist Cory Stantorf said. “So regardless of where you’re at, whether it’s a viewing deck or the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge, Kincaid, you always have to be prepared and ready for an encounter with wildlife, whether it’s bear, moose, wolves.”

And then there was this headline from 2005:

“Nothing to worry about,” said my son, as he loaded his .44 revolver and packed it into the holster strapped to his chest. “Just in case.”

By the way, notice how the Fish and Game biologist spoke of “bear encounters,” rather than “bear attacks.” Political correctness run amok. I expect this kind of euphemism from Democrats in Philadelphia (“Carjacking encounters can happen anywhere”) but this is Alaska, OK? We’re talking the Final Frontier, pioneers in the wilderness. When I “encounter” a gigantic omnivorous wild beast with fangs and claws, this is a bear attack, I don’t care what you call it. Anyway . . .

We headed up the highway to Thunder Bird Falls, which is in Chugach State Park. An interesting Alaska cultural note: “Chugach” is a compound word, from the native chu (“eaten by”) and gach (“bears”).

On our way to adventure.

A helpful map near the park entrance, showing visitors where they can get eaten by grizzly bears (i.e., everywhere)

Thunder Bird Falls is on the Eklutna River, which is less than 12 miles long, tumbling down from the top of a mountain to the Cook Inlet in the Gulf of Alaska. The inlet is named for 18th-century British explorer Captain James Cook, who sailed into the inlet seeking the fabled Northwest Passage. Given the trend whereby Mount McKinley has been renamed “Denali” (because that’s what the natives allegedly called it), it’s probably only a matter of time before Cook Inlet gets renamed, because you can’t name stuff after white guys anymore. Meanwhile . . .

Another interesting Alaska cultural fact: Eklutna is also a compound word, from the native eklu (“food for”) and utna (“grizzly bears”).

If you’re getting tired of my dark sarcasm, imagine how my wife felt as I was cracking these jokes all the way to the park. Facing danger with a smile on your face — that’s just the way I roll. And because of my habitual sarcasm, you may think I was joking when I talked about my son strapping a .44 to his chest before we left the house.

See the revolver handle sticking out of the holster? In addition to being a Ranger-qualified Army Airborne sergeant first class, my son is also a serious hunting enthusiast, who is currently planning bow-hunting expeditions for mountain sheep (aoudad) this fall. On our trip to Thunder Bird Falls, he was telling me something about the state game laws that protect the bears, and I was thinking, “Shouldn’t the laws be about protecting people?” Fortunately, there is a loophole in the laws, so that it’s not illegal to kill a bear in self-defense, but because this is 2023, I’m sure some environmentalist version of Ben Crump would show up to lead a protest claiming the bear was an honor student who was just minding his own business when you killed it: “No justice! No peace!”

Anyway, my son had a pistol strapped to his chest, and a two-month-old baby girl strapped to his back, because he’s a badass that way.

Grandma and Eliza: Smile and say, ‘Bears!’

So now we had the family ready for the hike up the trail, and if I was (mostly) joking about the danger of a “bear encounter,” soon I encountered something perfectly calculated to inspire fear.

OH MY DEAR GOD! While I’d been clowning around about the prospect of being eaten by grizzly bears, it hadn’t occurred to me that this trail followed the edge of a deep mountain gorge. Exactly how high was that “STEEP CLIFF” the sign was warning me about? I don’t know, because I’m so afraid of heights I didn’t dare get close enough to look.

It’s weird how my acrophobia is selective. Like, I’m not afraid of every high-altitude situation. We’d flown over 3,000 miles to get to Alaska, and that didn’t scare me at all. And when I was a kid, it was nothing to climb way up in the biggest poplar tree in the neighbor’s yard. But put me on the edge of a precipice — no, I can’t stand that. It terrifies me. Any action-adventure film where the hero is dangling off the side of a skyscraper? Nope. Never see those scenes. Got my eyes closed.

That first sign, warning me how close I was to the “STEEP CLIFF” — plummeting hundreds of feet to my death — caused me to notice how narrow the trail was, and how crowded it was with tourists who seemed utterly heedless of their proximity to “DANGER.”

When I’d started out up the trail, my main concern was about the my-thighs-are-getting-sore steepness of the climb. Once I realized there was a “STEEP CLIFF” just a few feet to my left, however, my concern shifted to the fact that there were whole families of tourists, some of them with dogs on leashes, carelessly loping up and down this trail with utter disregard of the “DANGER” nearby. And the trail was barely wide enough for three people to walk side-by-side safely, so that when I’d see a cluster of tourists approaching, I’d get wwaaaayy over to the right side of the trail to let them pass. And, every 40 or 50 yards up the trail, there’d be another one of those signs: “DANGER! STEEP CLIFF! STAY ON TRAIL!” And I’d be muttering, “Yeah, you didn’t have to tell me twice.”

About a half-mile up the trail, we reached the “Gorge Overlook.”

Family members foolishly risk their lives.

It must be explained that I also have vicarious acrophobia — it’s not just that I’m afraid of heights, but I also get freaked out by seeing other people near the edge of a precipice, especially my kids. Like, when the boys were little, we’d hike up to Black Rock, and I’d be a bundle of nerves whenever they’d go to the edge of those cliffs. While I could control my own risk — I ain’t going anywhere near the edge, if I can help it — the children were beyond my control, and I was deathly afraid of them falling off. Wonderful irony that my son should have become a paratrooper, but “out of sight, out of mind.” I can ignore Bob’s death-defying career choices, because I don’t have to see it, and am therefore capable of blocking it out of my consciousness. Meanwhile . . .

Staying far away from danger

While everybody else was RISKING THEIR LIVES at the “Gorge Overlook,” I was on the other side of the trail, chilling out — and by “chilling out,” of course I mean, avoiding psychiatric trauma.

Should I mention that I dislike the word “acrophobia”? Because a “phobia” is an irrational fear, whereas being 300 feet above a river gorge is a real danger, and therefore my fear is perfectly rational. The crazy people are the ones who can stare down at the bottom of that cliff and not freak out, but the psychiatric community doesn’t have a word for that.

My daughter-in-law laughs at the danger

See what I mean? She’s standing next to a sign that clearly says “DANGER,” and she’s laughing at my (entirely rational) fear.

It’s Alaska. It’s about survival on the frontier — basically living inside a Jack London novel, and I’m pretty sure his protagonists never took any unnecessary risks, simply because life was so difficult they didn’t have time for cheap thrills. But nonetheless, we continued hiking up to the “Falls Overlook,” with me trailing behind so that I could navigate around the clusters of dumbass tourists who kept coming down the trail with no apparent concern about the “STEEP CLIFF” on one side.

As we approached the overlook, the path turned into a sort of wooden deck, with rails on either side. DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN! We were literally suspended over the side of the cliff by some kind of jerry-rigged cantilever construction that I’m certain would not pass a safety inspection in any of the Lower 48 states. The headlines were easy to imagine:

JOURNALIST KILLED WHEN OBESE TOURIST
CAUSES OVERLOOK WALKWAY COLLAPSE

Even if I’m not as skinny as I used to be, still I’m easily 100 pounds lighter than some of the tourists who were clomping around up there.

So the family went ahead of me to the overlook, while I hung back waiting for the crowd to clear out. Because if I’m going onto an overlook deck, I’m sure as hell not going onto it while it’s occupied by:

  • 7 or 8 fat tourists;
  • 5 or 6 of their clumsy low-IQ children;
    and
  • 3 or 4 dogs.

What is it with people taking their dogs everywhere they go? Like, it’s important for your dogs to have the cultural enrichment of travel? Perhaps most people don’t think about this, and maybe my misanthropic streak was aggravated by the circumstances, but COULD YOU IDIOTS PLEASE LEAVE YOUR DOGS HOME when I’m trying to walk a trail marked with “DANGER STEEP CLIFF” signs every 50 yards?

Finally, the crowd thinned out enough, and I was ready.

Smile for the camera!

You may notice in that picture that my left hand is very firmly gripped on the rail, because I’m surviving, like a Jack London hero. Also notice that I’m wearing red sneakers. Those aren’t my sneakers. I’d expected to wear my normal street shoes — tasseled loafers — for this hike, but my son insisted on lending me a pair of his sneakers, and boy, I’m glad he did. As bad as it was going up that “DANGER STEEP CLIFFS” trail, it would have been a thousand times worse if I’d been wearing slick-soled loafers instead of those sneakers. Grateful for every small advantage.

My son’s family.

Despite my advanced age, I out-hiked everybody on the way back down the mountain. It wasn’t even close. Smile for the camera — snap! — and then I set off at a blistering pace, because the faster I went, the sooner I’d be away from “DANGER STEEP CLIFFS.” By the time the rest of the family got to the bottom of the trail, I’d been sitting there 15 minutes, smoking a cigarette, smiling like the hero of a Jack London novel.

 

Throwing in The Big Yellow Button here because I hope you’re enjoying this tale of my Alaska adventures enough to hit the freaking tip jar. And don’t worry about the IRS, because of course, I’ve got plenty of tax-deductible business expenses from this trip. This is one of the beauties of being a Professional Journalist™ in America — anything becomes a “business expense” if you write about it. You write about travel? Tax-deductible business expense. You write about food?

Having survived the trip to Thunder Bird Falls, and to celebrate not getting eaten by bears or falling off a cliff, we headed up to Palmer, where we dined at La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant. This was the occasion of even more of my habitual sarcasm, because who else would travel to the arctic wilderness to eat Mexican food? And as we were heading up there, I already knew what I was going to order, because the menu in every Mexican restaurant has it — the #1 Combination Plate, with a beef taco, chicken enchilada, rice and beans. There is nothing more predictable than the #1 Combination Plate, which is why I always order it. And, wearing my Professional Journalist™ hat as a food critic, I can tell you that La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant serves excellent food in large portions. My wife ordered the vegetarian burrito and it was ENORMOUS! As soon as they brought it out, I was like, “Just go ahead and bring us a take-out box, because there’s no way she’s going to eat that whole thing.”

After dinner, we did a bit of sightseeing in downtown Palmer — the view of the mountains is breathtaking — then went for ice cream at The Big Dipper, which is also excellent, the Professional Journalist™ said.

Having survived the wilderness — in a thrilling Jack London way — I took a long nap when we got back, and now, after 2,000 words, I must remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

Category: Alabama, Shoe Leather Fund

Just a Bear Walking Down the Street

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | Comments Off on Just a Bear Walking Down the Street

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska
After an exciting day when we visited Thunder Bird Falls and had dinner in Palmer, I went immediately to bed, about 7 p.m. local time Saturday. Around midnight, my wife woke me up to show me the video she had captured of a bear walking around outside our son’s house. I tried to get back to sleep, but about 1:30 a.m., gave up and came downstairs, intending to write up our Saturday activities. So I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and when I glanced up from my phone — there it was!



 

 

Category: Alaska

FMJRA 2.0: No Joy In Philly

Posted on | July 1, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: No Joy In Philly

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Fresh off a sweep of the Red Sox in Fenway on Tuesday, the Senators went to Shibe Park expecting to rock the 10-11 Phillies, but it was not to be. We lost two of the three games (game #2, where we started Jim Kaat much to our regret, wasn’t even close) and barely managed to salvage the third game as Juan Marichal outdueled ex-Senator Larry Dierker. Still, that makes us 4-2 on the week, and that makes Teddy Baseball happy.
After a couple of weeks of bucketing around various nations’ postal services, I finally got Klaus Schulze’s La Vie Electronique Volume 9, which has some really neat music, a couple of interviews, and no screeching by Arthur Brown. On to Volume 10!
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Our manager is not in his happy place, but he’s not displeased.

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Category: FMJRA Award

Have The Dutch Torn Down All Their Statues and Renamed All Their Streets?

Posted on | July 1, 2023 | Comments Off on Have The Dutch Torn Down All Their Statues and Renamed All Their Streets?

Obviously it’s just a matter of time:

Dutch King Willem-Alexander has apologized for his country’s historic involvement in slavery and its ongoing repercussions, as the Netherlands on Saturday begins an official event to mark 150 years since the end of slavery in Dutch colonies.
The king issued his apology during a speech marking the event.
“Today I’m standing here in front of you as your king and as part of the government. Today I am apologising myself,” Willem-Alexander said. “And I feel the weight of the words in my heart and my soul.”
The king commissioned a study into the exact role the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange-Nassau, played in slavery in the Netherlands.
He asked for forgiveness “for the clear failure to act in the face of this crime against humanity.”
Thousands of descendants from the former Dutch colony of Suriname and the Dutch overseas territories of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao are attending celebrations in Amsterdam.
The event has been dubbed “Keti Koti,” meaning “breaking chains” in Sranan Togo, a Creole language spoken in Suriname.
Queen Maxina and Prime Minister Mark Rutte are also expected to attend Keti Koti commemorations. . . .
Last December, Rutte apologized for slavery on behalf of the Dutch government.
A number of Dutch cities, including Amsterdam, issued their own apologies before the prime minister did so.
Beginning in the 17th Century, the Netherlands grew into one of Europe’s major colonial powers and was responsible for about 5% of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Some 600,000 slaves were transported from Africa to colonies in the Americas, and many Javanese and Balinese people were enslaved and taken to South Africa under Dutch colonial rule.
The Netherlands officially abolished slavery on July 1, 1863. However, slaves continued working on plantations in the Dutch Caribbean for another decade before abolition was put into practice.

As I said quite recently:

If one studies slavery from a global and historical perspective, the idea of a transtemporal collective grievance — an idea Thomas Sowell addresses in The Quest for Cosmic Justice — is simply absurd. To carry around permanent grudges over the practices of antiquity is a foolish posture. 

Sowell addressed the issue of colonialism more specifically in Conquests and Cultures: An International History, the general point of which is that the endless anti-American guilt-tripping by “progressives” over our nation’s history is based on ignorance. Almost everybody everywhere in the world has, at one time or another, been either a “victim” or “oppressor,” as such things as judged by the Social Justice Warriors who insist that we should feel ashamed if we are one or two notches above anyone else on the socioeconomic hierarchy. Just yesterday, for example, I was re-reading Winston Churchill’s account of the English Civil War, when King Charles was beheaded and various of the aristocracy who supported his Royalist (“Cavalier”) cause had their property stolen by supporters of the victorious Republican (“Roundhead”) faction. After about a dozen years of Puritan dictatorship, when the English finally decided they’d be better off with a king, Charles II was welcomed to take the crown under an agreement that stipulated, among other things, that the properties seized during the Civil War would not be returned to their previous owners. So the heirs of various dukes and earls were never compensated for their lost property. No “social justice” for them.

Well, so much for the disinherited and expropriated English Royalists. What about the former Dutch colony of Suriname?

It has a population of approximately 612,985, dominated by descendants from the slaves and labourers brought in from Africa and Asia by the Dutch Empire and Republic. . . .
Europeans arrived in the 16th century, with the Dutch establishing control over much of the country’s current territory by the late 17th century. During the Dutch colonial period, Suriname was a lucrative source of sugar, its plantation economy driven by African slave labour, and after abolition of slavery in 1863, by indentured servants from Asia, predominantly from British India, as well as the Dutch East Indies. . . .
In 1667, during negotiations leading to the Treaty of Breda after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch decided to keep the nascent plantation colony of Surinam they had gained from the English. In return the English kept New Amsterdam, the main city of the former colony of New Netherland in North America on the mid-Atlantic coast. The British renamed it New York City, after the Duke of York who would later become King James II of England. . . .

(Excellent bargain you made there, Dutch colonialists!)

The Netherlands abolished slavery in Suriname in 1863, under a gradual process that required slaves to work on plantations for 10 transition years for minimal pay, which was considered as partial compensation for their masters. After that transition period expired in 1873, most freedmen largely abandoned the plantations where they had worked for several generations in favor of the capital city, Paramaribo. Some of them were able to purchase the plantations they worked on, especially in the district of Para and Coronie. Their descendants still live on those grounds today. . . .
As a plantation colony, Suriname had an economy dependent on labor-intensive commodity crops. To make up for a shortage of labor, the Dutch recruited and transported contract or indentured laborers from the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) and India (the latter through an arrangement with the British, who then ruled the area). In addition, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, small numbers of laborers, mostly men, were recruited from China and the Middle East. . . .
The largest ethnic group are Indians [i.e., descendants of laborers brought from India], who form over a quarter of the population (27.4%). . . . If counted as one ethnic group, the Afro-Surinamese are the largest community, at around 37.4%; however, they are usually divided into two cultural/ethnic groups: the Creoles and the Maroons. Surinamese Maroons, whose ancestors are mostly runaway slaves that fled to the interior, comprise 21.7% of the population. . . . Surinamese Creoles, mixed people descending from African slaves and Europeans (mostly Dutch), form 15.7% of the population. . . . Javanese make up 14% of the population, and like the East Indians, descend largely from workers contracted from the island of Java in the former Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). . . .
A small but influential number of Europeans remain in the country, comprising about 1% of the population.

Very interesting. Now, per capital gross domestic product:

Netherlands ….. $61,098
Suriname ………… $5,556

You can hear all the SJWs screaming: “RAAAAACISM!”

But instead of comparing Suriname’s per capital GDP to the Netherlands (the world’s 11th-richest country), let’s compare it to two countries where the ancestors of modern-day Surinamese came from:

Suriname ………… $5,556
Indonesia ……….. $5,016
India ……………….. $2,601

Now, compare to a few nations of the “Slave Coast” of Africa:

Suriname ………… $5,556
Angola …………….. $3,204
Ivory Coast ………. $2,646
Nigeria …………… $2,280
Senegal …………… $1,719
Cameroon ………. $1,699
Guinea …………… $1,549

It is not a defense of slavery, nor of 17th-century Dutch colonial policy, to point out that the modern descendants of slaves in Suriname are demonstrably better off than residents of many African nations. However, it is a useful antidote to the idiotic social-justice mentality that leads to the absurd spectacle of the King of the Netherlands confessing to his personal guilt in “this crime against humanity.” Right, and I’m still waiting for an apology from the King of England for the various “crimes against humanity” perpetrated against my Scottish ancestors.

Only from what Sowell calls the “cosmic justice” perspective does this kind of guilt-tripping make sense: “Let’s all point fingers about what happened 200 or 300 years ago, because that’s easier than finding practical ways to deal with the problems we have in the here and now!”

Meanwhile, some Dutch guy is reading my blog and saying, “Wait a minute — we traded New York to the English for freaking Suriname? What a rip-off! Let’s make the English apologize for that swindle!”

BWAHAHAHAHA! Sucks to be you, Dutch guy.



 

 

Category: History, Netherlands, Racism

The Supreme Court Ruling Won’t Change the Ivy League’s Racial Quota Regime

Posted on | July 1, 2023 | Comments Off on The Supreme Court Ruling Won’t Change the Ivy League’s Racial Quota Regime

Liberals are running around with their hair on fire, shrieking that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard will necessarily produce a 21st-century Jim Crow, an idea so absurd that only liberals could possibly believe it. In fact, the safest prediction in the world is that nothing will change in the way the Ivy League and other “selective” universities choose their incoming freshman classes on the basis of racial quotas. It took more than 10 years for this lawsuit to make it all the way to the Supreme Court, by which time nearly every elite university (e.g., Columbia) announced that they would eliminate the SAT as a factor in determining admissions. They did this because SAT scores served as a crucial data point — an objective metric of academic qualification — cited by the Asian-American students who sued Harvard.

Probably no one would object if the level of favoritism extended to “underrepresented minorities” was modest. However, as the data obtained as part of discovery during the lawsuit demonstrates, the “diversity” regime at Harvard involved extreme favoritism, so that if an Asian student and a black student had identical qualifications (as measured by SATs and GPAs), the black student was more than 4 times as likely to be admitted as the Asian student. There was a reason, after all, that the admissions process at Harvard (and other elite schools) was so secretive that it took a federal lawsuit to discover the facts. If people actually knew what was happening, they’d be outraged. And, as the data obtained in the lawsuit demonstrated, “diversity” was just a fancy word for racial quotas. Year after year, Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 14% black — never 11% or 17%, but always within a few decimal points of 14% — making it plain that the administration had settled on this as the “correct” number of black students to be admitted, and then arranged the process to achieve that quota. Asian students were most affected by this quota regime, as the Harvard administration clearly didn’t want to have “too many” Asian students, because that would deprive whites of the opportunity to soak in this carefully formulated bath of “diversity.”

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was added as a defendant in the lawsuit because, although UNC-Chapel Hill is not nearly as “elite” as Harvard, it is the prestigious flagship of the state’s university system, and the admissions process there reflected a similar “diversity” rationale for what were, in fact, discriminatory racial quotas that favored “underrepresented” (black and Hispanic) minorities, while disfavoring Asians and whites. In all such cases, wherever the regime of “diversity” exists, it results in evaluating people not on objective measurements of individual merit, but rather on the basis of membership in racial groups. And this emphasis on group identity breeds and nourishes resentments that might not otherwise exist — the obsession with “diversity” actually causes racism, or at least aggravates it, rather than alleviating it.

Before I share a few of the ridiculous “hot take” reactions from liberals about the Supreme Court decision, let me first emphasize this prediction about the results of the ruling: NOTHING WILL CHANGE.

Harvard and other “elite” schools will continue doing exactly what they’ve been doing, and if they get sued again, so what? They don’t care. It’s not like Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is going to swoop down and send federal marshals to prevent Harvard from doing whatever it wants in pursuit of “diversity.” Harvard will continue admitting the same 14% quota of black students and, if they do grudgingly admit a few extra Asian students as a token gesture of compliance with the SCOTUS ruling, those extra seats for Asians in the freshman class will be obtained by admitting fewer white students, so that the quotas for “underrepresented minority” students remain undisturbed. The alarmist Chicken Little sky-is-falling outrage from liberals is just emotional venting, and has nothing to do with the actual effect of the Supreme Court’s decision, which won’t change anything meaningful at elite universities.



 

 

Category: Racism, Supreme Court, The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent
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