‘Something for Everyone to Hate’

Posted on | December 28, 2020 | 1 Comment

It would be interesting to know how many high-school students in Loudon County, Virginia, would be able to identify Col. Edward D. Baker. If you are a student of the Civil War, you know that Baker’s death in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff was the chief inspiration for the creation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, chaired by the radical abolitionist Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio. This tale is told artfully by Bruce Catton in a dozen pages (pp. 68-80) of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, a book I doubt any recent student at Heritage High School in Leesburg has actually bothered to read, despite the fact that the historic events related by Catton happened about five miles down the road from the high school.

Military history is almost completely absent from the 21st-century curriculum, which is big on “social justice” themes and short of any genuinely useful knowledge. What students are expected to learn in school now is not facts, but rather a politically-correct attitude. The way history is now taught, the chief goal of the curriculum is to inspire teenagers with the kind of fanatical passion for “progressive” values that one might find in an Antifa riot in Portland, Oregon — fire-bombing police cars as your senior project. But I digress . . .

Heritage High School was the scene of a teenage melodrama this summer, when a vindictive punk decided to make a big deal out of a Snapchat video, thus destroying the reputation of the captain of the school’s varsity cheerleading squad. “There’s something for everyone to hate in this story,” Ed Driscoll remarks, and indeed I found something:

How long must the South be chastised for its history? For the editors of the New York Times, apparently, the answer is, “Forever.” Nothing could be more obvious in its intended purpose than the non-accidental choice of Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest iteration of the tiresomely familiar “Legacy of Slavery” theme in the New York Times.
If you are not a Southerner, or if you pay no attention to the New York Times, you may be unfamiliar with that newspaper’s long tradition of invoking slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow as a means of insinuating the South’s permanent status of moral inferiority. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

Category: American Spectator, History, New York Times, Virginia

Rule 5 Sunday: Sally Field

Posted on | December 28, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I was thinking earlier that Smokey & The Bandit was a movie that couldn’t be remade these days, because in an age when you can walk into any supermarket in most states and get whatever beer you want, who would smuggle a semi-trailer full of Coors from Texas to Georgia? Also, who could replace Jerry Reed, Burt Reynolds, and Jackie Gleason, to say nothing of Sally Field? Apparently Universal wants to give it a try, though. Here’s Sally in a still from the movie.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Now there’s a runaway bride worth chasing!

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1211, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Merry Christmas and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: The Petersens, The Magic Flute, Nordic Solstice, Cendrillon, Beautiful Star Of Bethlehem, The Ronettes, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Feast Of The Seven Fishes, Darleen Love, La Boheme, Judy Garland, Hansel & Gretel, Felicity Jones, Celtic Women, El Cid, The Merry Widow, and MAGA Ivanka.

A View From The Beach: Out of Season – Autumn Reeser, A Biden Crime Family Christmas, Fish Pic Friday – Christmas Edition, Christmas Time is Here, By Golly, “Pontoon”, Wednesday Wetness, Tattoo Tuesday?, Your Monday Morning Stimulus and Palm Sunday

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Eastbound & Down

Posted on | December 28, 2020 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Eastbound & Down

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

British Court Rules It’s OK to Call ‘Stephanie Hayden’ a ‘Pig in a Wig’
357 Magnum
EBL

The Lewinsky Scandal and Media Bias
Rotten Chestnuts
EBL

A Grim Anniversary in Kansas
357 Magnum
EBL

Do You Have Enough Ammunition?
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: The Mountain Road
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Santa Ereshkigal
Animal Magnetism
Harsh Brutus
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

The Wedding Was Lovely
Bacon Time
Dark Brightness
EBL

Be Patient
The Pirate’s Cove
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.21.20
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Ode to SCOTUS
357 Magnum
EBL

The Destructive Meaning of ‘Equality’
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.23.20 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

Raphael Warnock: Dindu Nuffin
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 12.24.20 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 12.24.20 (Christmas Eve Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

‘Happy Trails, Hans’: What Is Everybody’s Favorite Christmas Movie Really About?
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending December 25:

EBL (16)
(tied) 357 Magnum, A View From The Beach, & Proof Positive (7)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Try Amazon Music Unlimited Free Trial
Kindle Unlimited Membership Plans
Best Sellers in Digital Music

Category: FMJRA Award

Left-Wing Journalist Among 4 Arrested in Arkansas for Firebombing Police Cars

Posted on | December 27, 2020 | 6 Comments

Renea Baek Goddard, 22, came to the United States as a child when her Air Force father, who had met her mother while stationed in South Korea, was transferred to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The family later moved to Arkansas when her father was transferred to Little Rock AFB. While a student at the Little Rock campus of the University of Arkansas, Goddard became a journalist and worked last year for a public radio station (KUAR) while also writing for other outlets including the left-wing site Truthout, where she wrote that “journalists have a responsibility to be vigilant” against white supremacists.

Well, I guess somebody needs to be “vigilant” against journalists, too:

Four suspects, including a journalist, from Little Rock, Ark. with extreme far-left ties were taken into custody and charged by federal authorities last week in connection to coordinated firebombings of police cruisers over the summer.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas announced that Brittany Dawn Jeffrey, 31, Renea Baek Goddard, 22, Aline Espinosa-Villegas, 24, and Emily Nowlin, 27, were arrested following a months-long ATF investigation.
The four suspects have been charged with malicious destruction of property belonging to an entity receiving federal funding, conspiracy to commit those acts and possession of a destructive device.

You can read the rest about this motley crew, but my favorite tidbit in this pathetic saga was unearthed by Andy Ngo:

Renea Baek Goddard, the social-justice journalist who has been federally charged over a firebombing attack in Little Rock, is also an amateur porn star. She interned for Arkansas Public Media & reported for KUAR. She goes by "Slutty Asian Teen" on OnlyFans despite being 22 y/o. pic.twitter.com/l35WRyUdud

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) December 26, 2020

Renea Goddard is a decidedly weird person. She has denounced U.S. “imperialism” for saving South Korea from Communism, and identifies as a Marxist lesbian even while vending her “slutty” images via the capitalist venue OnlyFans. Too bad we can’t send her to Pyongyang.

Category: Arkansas, Crime

‘Person of Interest’

Posted on | December 26, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Person of Interest’

Everybody is now reporting — although police have not yet officially confirmed — that Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, has been identified as a “person of interest” in Friday’s Nashville explosion. ATF and FBI agents are reportedly searching Warner’s home in the Nashville suburb of Antioch, Tennessee. He reportedly gave away his home to a woman last month, and at least to me, this would seem to suggest that Warner (who was unmarried and had no children) was in a state of suicidal despair.

So my guess would be that Warner blew himself up in the explosion, and the real mystery is why he apparently targeted the AT&T building.

Category: Crime, Tennessee

Mysterious Explosion in Nashville

Posted on | December 26, 2020 | 4 Comments

This appears to be some kind of terrorist attack:

A bomb planted in a recreational vehicle parked in the deserted streets of downtown Nashville exploded early Christmas morning, injuring three people and creating chaotic communications outages that took down police emergency systems.
The explosion was preceded by a chilling warning that urged people to evacuate the area.
Three people were hospitalized in stable condition Friday evening, and human remains may have been found at the scene, authorities said.
“We have found tissue that we believe could be remains,” Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at a news conference Friday afternoon. The chief said it was unclear if the remains came from someone in the RV.
“The RV was detonated so if it was someone inside, we have no idea,” Drake said. “It was such a large explosion.”
Police were responding to a report of shots fired when they found the vehicle, with an eerie recording playing, Drake said. The voice on the recording commanded: “If you can hear this message, evacuate now.”
Police called in the bomb squad and rushed to clear nearby buildings.
“The officers immediately began knocking on doors and evacuating residents here, not knowing if the bomb was going to go off immediately, or if it was going to go off in the time that was stated,” Drake said. “The officers saved lives today, and their heroism should be noted.”
The blast occurred at 6:29 a.m. local time, before the bomb squad arrived.
The explosion was near an AT&T building, causing disruptions in phone service and 911 systems up to 180 miles away. The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily stopped flights out of Nashville International Airport due to the communications problems.
AT&T said in a statement it was “putting the full force of our disaster recovery efforts into responding to this morning’s explosion in Nashville.”

That the bomb was placed next to an AT&T building suggests that this was the intended target. So who would want to take out this communication facility and why? And why Nashville, of all places?

Also, what about that recorded warning to evacuate the area? This is further evidence suggesting that the bomber sought to destroy the AT&T building, rather than seeking to maximize human casualties, as terrorist bombers normally would. Setting the bomb at 6:30 a.m. on Christmas morning, when the streets were empty, is also evidence pointing in the same direction. But that might be a red herring, an attempt to mislead investigators by creating misleading evidence. The bomb might be an elaborate cover-up to conceal another crime, as police suspected in the case of the Speedway Bomber.

The investigation will obviously begin with determining who owned that RV. Once that is known, the rest of the relevant facts will come tumbling out in a rush. Building an enormous bomb requires time and resources, as well as extensive specialized knowledge. Achieving a timed detonation, as appears to be the case here, is a difficult feat, requiring the bomb-maker to avoid a premature accidental detonation.

If the motive for this bombing is political, what sort of politics? They did not choose as their target a synagogue or a mosque, nor was the target a government building or the office of a political party. The choice of the AT&T building — what does that suggest? AT&T is a gigantic conglomerate that bought out Time-Warner a few years ago. But why would the bomber target the company’s Nashville office? This is a strange puzzle, and I’m sure when the case is solved — probably within the next 72 hours — the story behind it will be quite interesting.

UPDATE: A 63-year-old man is reportedly a “person of interest.”

Category: Crime, Tennessee, Terrorism

‘Happy Trails, Hans’: What Is Everybody’s Favorite Christmas Movie Really About?

Posted on | December 25, 2020 | 2 Comments

My brother and I celebrated Christmas Eve by watching Diehard together. The movie suffers from all the usual suspension-of-disbelief problems common to action films — e.g., automatic weapons that fire an impossibly large number of bullets without changing magazines — there is no doubt that Diehard is a Christmas movie. And this is not just my opinion, but has been stated directly by the director John McTiernan.

Strangely enough, while finally settling the debate over whether Diehard is a Christmas movie, McTiernan provoked another controversy, saying that the movie was intended as anti-capitalist propaganda. Although I shouldn’t have to include “spoiler alerts” for a 1988 film — the Bruce Willis character John McClane triumphs over the villain Hans Gruber — a discussion of the plot is necessary to understand the left-wing perspective of Diehard which nobody seemed to notice until it was pointed out by the director. The movie is based on a 1979 novel by Roderick Thorp. Wikipedia describes the plot of Nothing Lasts Forever:

Retired NYPD detective Joe Leland is visiting the 40-story office headquarters of the Klaxon Oil Corporation in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, where his daughter Stephanie Leland Gennaro works. While he is waiting for his daughter’s Christmas party to end, a group of German Autumn–era terrorists take over the skyscraper. The gang is led by the brutal Anton “Little Tony the Red” Gruber. Joe had known about Gruber through a counter-terrorism conference he had attended years prior. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the gigantic office complex. Aided outside only by Los Angeles Police sergeant Al Powell and armed with only his police-issue pistol, Leland fights off the terrorists one by one in an attempt to save the 74 hostages, and his daughter and grandchildren.
The terrorists plan to steal documents that will publicly expose the Klaxon corporation’s dealings with Chile’s junta. They also intend to deprive Klaxon of the proceeds of the corrupt deal by dumping $6,000,000 in cash out of the tower’s windows. Leland not only believes their claims, but also that his daughter is involved.
Leland kills eleven of the terrorists, but in the end he fails to save his daughter, who falls to her death with Gruber after he was shot by Leland. Blaming Klaxon for the terrorist attack, Leland throws the cash out of the window himself. As Leland is leaving the building, the last terrorist Karl, who was presumed dead earlier, returns and starts a shooting rampage, killing the police chief Dwayne Robinson in the process, before Powell finally kills him.

This requires a brief history lesson: What is “German Autumn”?

The German Autumn (German: Deutscher Herbst) was a series of events in Germany in late 1977 associated with the kidnapping and murder of industrialist and businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) and the Federation of German Industries (BDI), by the Red Army Faction (RAF) far-left militant organisation, and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 (known in Germany by the aircraft’s name, Landshut) by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They demanded the release of ten RAF members detained at the Stammheim Prison plus two Palestinian compatriots held in Turkey and US$15 million in exchange for the hostages. The assassination of Siegfried Buback, the attorney-general of West Germany on 7 April 1977, and the failed kidnapping and murder of the banker Jürgen Ponto on 30 July 1977, marked the beginning of the German Autumn. It ended on 18 October, with the liberation of the Landshut, the death of the leading figures of the first generation of the RAF in their prison cells, and the death of Schleyer.

So what Thorp’s novel imagines is this left-wing European terrorism making its appearance in the United States. Anyone old enough to remember the 1970s recognized that the Hans Gruber character was inspired by Germany’s Red Army Faction, a Communist revolutionary group otherwise known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang (allow me to recommend Hitler’s Children as introductory reading on this subject).

Younger audiences know nothing of Baader-Meinhof and the larger context of violent left-wing radicalism during the Cold War (e.g., the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army) and so the Hans Gruber character makes no sense at all to them. Also, notice that the 1979 novel has the corporate villain as an oil company involved in corrupt dealings with “Chile’s junta,” another historical reference that will be lost on younger audiences who don’t know anything about Augusto Pinochet. Of course, Chile has never been a significant source of petroleum, but never mind that. The point is that the novel’s plot had a built-in anti-capitalist message — American corporations profiting from corrupt deals with foreign dictators — that somehow wasn’t anti-capitalist enough to suit the director of Diehard.

Now, let’s hear from the director on the changes he made:

“Joel Silver sent me the script three, four times. And it was about these horrible leftist terrorists that come into the sort of Valhalla of capitalism, Los Angeles, and they bring their guns and their evil ways and they shoot up people just celebrating Christmas, terrible people, awful. And it was really about the stern face of authority stepping into put things right again, you know? And I kept saying to Joel, I don’t want to make that,” he said.
McTiernan said he used “It’s A Wonderful Life” as a source of inspiration for the direction he wanted the movie to go, primarily its critique on unfettered capitalism.
“I went to Joel. And I said, ‘Okay, if you want me to make this terrorist movie, I want to make it where the hero in the first scene when the limo driver apologizes that he’s never been in a limo before,” he said. “The hero says it’s alright. I’ve never ridden in a limo before. Okay, working class hero.”
“And Joel understood what I meant. And he said okay. And so we started to work on it,” he continued. “And in fact, everybody, as they came to work on the movie began to get, as I said, this idea of this movie as an escapee. And there was a joy in it. Because we were, we’ve had changed the content. And that is how ‘Die Hard’ became, we hadn’t intended it to be a Christmas movie, but the joy that came from it is what turned it into a Christmas movie. And that’s really the best I can tell you about it.”

That’s just . . . crazy.

By 1988, it was entirely commonplace for groups of middle-class teenagers to rent limousines for their prom dates. Making a limo ride a symbol of evil capitalism — a point of honor for the “working class hero” that he had never ridden in a limousine — is a childish gesture. Insofar as the limousine symbolizes luxurious decadence, this is not something that the average American thinks much about, either to resent or to envy.

To a mature and intelligent person, there is no sinister mystery surrounding wealth and the symbolic trappings of wealth. We don’t need a paranoid Marxist conspiracy theory to explain why some people are richer than others and, unless we are suffering from some deficit of self-esteem, we are not awed by the show-off gestures of people who are so crass as to flaunt their wealth. Some people are impressed (and seek to impress others) with name brands, as if a pair of jeans or a purse were inherently more valuable because it was emblazoned with a designer’s logo, and we have a word for such people: Fools.

Did I ever mention that I once worked in the men’s wear department of a major retailer? When you’re getting a 25% employee discount even off the “sale” price of clothing, it gives you some idea of what how much retail mark-up is paid by fools who think they’re getting a bargain on some fancy brand-name merchandise. My shirts were Pierre Cardin and my ties were Ralph Lauren, but I sure as hell never paid the retail price.

Genuinely rich people are seldom ostentatious about their wealth. One of the reasons so many people hate Donald Trump so much — even before he got into politics, they hated him for it — is because he was always so ostentatious, which offends our Christian sensibilities. It is cruel for the rich man to flaunt his wealth in the face of the less fortunate. Envy is a sin, and when someone makes a point of showing off their wealth, they are inspiring sinful resentments in others, much the same as the woman who dresses like a slut is sinfully inciting lust. It is one thing to appreciate the finer things in life, to be grateful for the rewards of success, and an entirely different thing to engage in behavior intended to humiliate others by flaunting in their faces those luxuries they cannot afford.

Is mere accumulation of material possessions the whole purpose of life? Should we evaluate others solely on what brand of shoes they wear?

I’ve described this “cargo cult” mentality toward wealth and the status symbols associated with wealth. Even if you work honestly to get rich, it is a mistake — indeed, a sin — to become obsessed with the material symbols of wealth, but we see this most plainly in how criminals ostentatiously display their ill-gotten gains:

After two days of jury trial, an Ashburn [Virginia] woman pleaded guilty [in October 2018] to wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to impersonate a federal agent to demand money, and obtaining confidential phone records.
According to court documents and the evidence at trial, Keisha L. Williams, 43, solicited over $5.4 million from more than 50 victims by telling them that she had paid a lot of money for a certain healthcare-related software overseas in Austria; that the software was being held in “escrow” because she still owed taxes, attorney’s fees, and other debt associated with the purchase; and that if they would just give her a short-term loan to get this software out of escrow and bring it to the United States, the software would be a huge success and everyone would be quickly repaid, with interest.
In truth, Williams spent over 95 percent of the victims’ money on creating a lifestyle of luxury for herself, including millions on international travel, retail purchases at stores like Chanel and Gucci, and close to half a million on maintaining her girlfriend.

You can buy a lot of Chanel and Gucci for $5 million, but why? What is it about the pleasure of possessing a designer handbag that would make someone willing to commit federal crimes to get it?

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

You care so much about impressing other people that you’ll perpetrate a $5 million fraud and spend it on Chanel and Gucci? Fools!

It is likewise foolish of a movie director to turn a limousine ride into a symbolic gesture about a “working class hero,” as if a character could not otherwise be heroic. Only the proletarians are worthy of admiration — that seems to be what John McTiernan meant to suggest with that bit in Diehard about John McClane never having ridden in a limo, but somehow that never registered to me as an “anti-capitalist” message.

Why would a successful movie director go through life carrying around that kind of chip-on-the-shoulder class resentment? I don’t know, and after nearly 2,000 words, I’ve probably not done much to increase anyone else’s understanding of this unfathomable mystery. In other words, I have failed in my purpose as a writer, which adequately explains why I haven’t gotten rich in this whole “journalism” racket. See, this is what people don’t want to admit — personal failure — and therefore construct warped worldviews in which they consider it wrong for other people to succeed. That’s what Marxism is about, demonizing wealth as a way to make people think of their own poverty as evidence of virtue. Such ideologies appeal only to fools, the kind of fools who don’t notice that the action-movie hero has fired hundreds of shots from a machine gun with only a 30-round magazine. But miracles happen at Christmas time, eh?

Every time John McClane kills a terrorist, an angel gets its wings.#DieHard #DiehardIsAChristmasMovie

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 25, 2020

So I started out writing about Diehard, meandered off into the history of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, then went on an extended digression about the ostentatious display of wealth, and if I wasn’t such a hopeless failure as a writer, I might offer some kind of thoughtful conclusion here. But instead, all I can do is to wish you a Merry Christmas and remind you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!