Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues

Posted on | November 21, 2023 | Comments Off on Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues

by Smitty

What could motivate me to get a blue check on ~~Twitter~~X?

Elon Musk Just Detonated His ‘Thermonuclear’ Lawsuit
The shark food doesn’t come cheap, but if Musk is successful, this might prove as important a move as buying Twitter.

Godspeed, Elon.

Category: Uncategorized

‘Young People … Taking an Interest in Peace and Social Justice’

Posted on | November 21, 2023 | 3 Comments

We now have a new synonym for rioters, coined by Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin, to describe the pro-Hamas mob that attacked the Democratic National Committee headquarters in D.C. last week:

Jake Tapper, CNN: But I want to ask you about the video this week of the pro-Palestinian protest outside the DNC that turned violent, outside the Democratic headquarters. . . . At another rally just down the street from here at Union Station, crowds were chanting: “From the river to the sea. Long live the intifada.”
What do you make of this, as a Jewish American, a proud progressive, a Democrat? There’s antisemitism in the Democratic Party these days.
Raskin: Well, I mean, there’s antisemitism everywhere these days, as we were discussing with Elon Musk.
Tapper: Yes.
Raskin: And, I mean, we’re talking about a problem that goes back thousands of years, obviously. I was very disappointed to see what happened over at the DNC the other day. I mean, I’m glad that there are young people who are taking an interest in peace and social justice. And those people, I encourage. But for those who are somehow tempted to engage in pushing and shoving, like Kevin McCarthy in Congress, but doing it outside, I’m totally opposed to that. They should study the history of nonviolent movements in America, like the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the LGBTQ movement, the environmental movement, that have been the great civilizing movements of our time and of American history that have transformed things.
And that does work better than violence.

What’s interesting here is Raskin’s automatic reflex response — deflection and “whataboutism” — to point fingers at Elon Musk or Kevin McCarthy, when the question asked was about Democrats supporting Hamas. Keep in mind that Raskin was one of the top inquisitors on the J6 “insurrection” committee. He’s in favor of sending Republicans to federal prison for years, if they cause trouble, but when a left-wing mob riots at the DNC, these are merely “young people who are taking an interest in peace and social justice” in whom he is “disappointed.”

Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin: "I was very disappointed to see what happened over at the DNC the other day. I mean, I'm glad that there are young people that are taking an interest in peace and social justice…" pic.twitter.com/Dil6WeKe0b

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 19, 2023

If you expected Jake Tapper to push back against Raskin’s evasion, you’d be — what was that phrase? — very disappointed.

Category: Democrats, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 11.20.23

Posted on | November 21, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.20.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Ethnic Cleansing in the Middle East and North Africa, Libertarian Javier Milei Wins in Argentina, Promises to cut bloated Argentine bureaucracy and government , and Rosalynn Carter, RIP
Twitchy: Here’s a Feel-Good Video Of Israel Blowing Up A Building, Things Get Awkward For Rabbis Holding Ceasefire Rally With Rashida Tlaib, and IT’S HAPPENING – Elon Musk Files Suit Against Media Matters
Louder With Crowder: Suck It, Patriarchy – Woman Beats Two Men To Win Miss Universe Pageant, Of course, the director of Disney’s “The Marvels” is blaming her movie tanking on you being a sexist bigot, and Male captain of girls high school volleyball team reportedly booed after asking opponent: “Did my penis distract you?”
Vox Popoli: Pizzagate Was Always Real, Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF, Go Ahead, Make Your List, The Inflation is Real, and Orcposting+
Draw & Talk: You Have 42 Days Left! Do Something About It!
Gab: Embracing AI – A Revolutionary Tool For Kingdom Development

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The “Judeo-Christian” Kill Shot
American Conservative: Armenia: The Forgotten Conflict, also, (Who Dies for) Peace in Ukraine?
American Greatness: Can We Save our Universities? Comer Accuses Biden White House of Obstructing Oversight Investigations, and Flirtation With Evil Will Not End Well for Leftists
American Thinker: Who is Pulling the Puppet Strings? Who Are the Real Climate Change Deniers? So — It Wasn’t the Sidewalk After All, Follow the Science — Except for Sex and Gender, and America on the Edge of the Cliff
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship shows support for Hamas terrorists, lights up Plaza of the Revolution with Palestinian flag, Reports from Cuba: Faced with alarming shortage of rice, Cuban authorities want to prepare idle land, Cuba’s Jewish community again rejects the Castro dictatorship’s anti-Israel stance, Rural retreat for Castro family and other Cuban elites exposed on social media, and As Nicaragua withdraws from OAS, State Dept. denounces dictatorship’s ‘egregious human rights abuses’
BattleSwarm: Texas House To School Choice: Drop Dead, Washington State vs. Gator’s Guns, and T-Rex Terror 1, Big Brother 0
Behind The Black: SpaceX successfully launches Superheavy and Starship, SaxaVord spaceport on Shetland Islands experiencing funding/regulatory problems, SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites, Webb: Needles scattered near the center of the Milky Way, Musk: Starship/Superheavy launchpad essentially undamaged after launch, and Jan 6th tapes prove Biden prosecutors knowingly falsified the charges that caused Matthew Perna to kill himself
Cafe Hayek: Expression Affects Third Parties
CDR Salamander: So, Red Sea Pirates It Is
Chicago Boyz: Worthwhile Reading & Viewing
Da Tech Guy: The Seven Faces You will Encounter in Debate, online and off and how to deal with them, What happened to caring about babies? Five Fast Thoughts Under the Fedora, and Review: The Kinks the Journey Part 1 and 2
Don Surber: Don’t anoint Milei just yet
First Street Journal: Western civilization has been a great boon to the entire world, even if the “decolonizers” hate it!
Gates Of Vienna: The Leaning Tower of Jihad, “It Will Be a Massacre of Millions of People”, Pickpockettes on the Paris Metro, and Let the Migrants Stay — Kill the Geezers Instead!
The Geller Report: Newly Released January 6th Bombshell Footage: “We Need to Investigate the J6 Committee,” “Police Facilitated January 6th”, New J6 Footage Shows Capitol Police Incited Riot By Firing Munitions Into Peaceful Crowd, and THEY’RE ALL IN ON IT
Hogewash: An Edge of the Cygnus Loop, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, The Orion Spacecraft Looks Back At Home, and A Fond Memory
Hollywood In Toto: Andrew Klavan Battled Sensitivity Readers to Bring Death to Life, Fall of Minneapolis Exposes the Media, Democrats and the Truth, Marvels Plummets up to 80 Percent in Box Office Nightmare, and Morgan Wallen Rocks Billboard Awards, Media Hardest Hit
The Lid: Nov. 19, 1863: Lincoln Delivers Greatest Presidential Speech Ever At Gettysburg, PA, also, Why Hamas Can Rightly Be Compared To Nazis: The Similarities Are Undeniable
Legal Insurrection: Anti-Israel Protesters Conquer And Occupy U. Michigan Administration Building, Wake Forest U. Prof Resigns After Defending Hamas Attack on Music Festival in Israel, Poll Shows Chicago Democrats Have Soured on Woke Mayor Brandon Johnson Just Six Months In, Wellesley High School in Massachusetts Cancels ‘USA Day’ Fearing it’s too Politicized, FBI and CDC Slammed for “Dropping the Ball” on Illegal California Biolab Run by Chinese, Notre Dame Students Hold Prayer Vigil to Protest Campus Drag Show, and Elon Musk (X Corp fka Twitter) Sues Media Matters, Alleges MM “Systematically Manipulated the X User Experience to Defame X”
Nebraska Energy Observer: Saturday – just for you, Thanksgiving Sunday, and Letters from the Front
Outkick: Here Comes Dolly! Peyton Manning Escorts Dolly Parton Onto The Field For ‘Rocky Top’ Performance At Tennessee-Georgia Game, Getting Juicier: Former LSU Stars Weigh In On Ongoing Angel Reese-Kim Mulkey Drama, Auburn Pays New Mexico State A Ridiculous Amount Of Money To Get Embarrassed At Home In Shocking Upset, Jerry Jones Announces Jimmy Johnson Will Enter Cowboys Ring Of Honor, Michigan Changes Tone Regarding Jim Harbaugh, Portending Lack Of Institutional Control Could Be Future Problem, Could The Dodgers Add Shohei Ohtani AND Mike Trout? and Dan Mullen Trolls Lincoln Riley As USC Gets Blown Out By UCLA
Power Line: Are EVs a Doomed Technology? Why There Can Never Be a Two-State Solution, American classic, and The last line of defense
Shark Tank: State Rep Fine Responds To Anti-Israel Sentiments On Local Media
Shot In The Dark: Don’t Cry For Milei Argentina, Righteous Battle,
This Ain’t Hell: Alexander Vindman’s brother to run for Congress, Army: About those COVID discharges, Goodbye Sara… we all loved you so, A tale of two successful…ships, sorta, and The U.S. Navy is requesting to increase its accidental whale collision limit
Transterrestrial Musings: On The Road Again
Victory Girls: Democrats Flip Out After January 6 Footage Is Released To Public, Mike Lee Calls For Investigation Into J6 Committee, and Cardi B Smokes NYC Mayor Eric Adams Over Budget Cuts
Volokh Conspiracy: Colorado Court Rules Trump Engaged in Insurrection, but Cannot Be Disqualified Under Section Three Because the President is not an “Officer of the United States”
Watts Up With That: WaPo Clauser Climate Crisis Damage Control: “There is a skeptical streak in the physics community…”, How Green Billionaires Groom the Public into Accepting Unworkable Net Zero Policies, Five Years Ago Today: California Governor: “In Less than Five Years, Even the Worst Skeptics Will Be Believers”, and A Look at California’s Landmark Climate Reporting Laws
The Federalist: Someone Please Rescue Miss USA From Her Lame Globalist Costume, Ranked-Choice Voting Advocates Are Forced To Lie About ‘Fairness’ To Get Voters On Board, We Are Just Scratching The Surface Of The Secrets Behind DEI, Pope Francis’ Removal Of Conservative Texas Bishop Exposes More Cracks In The Vatican’s New Agenda, Rage Over Charissa Thompson’s Fabrications Should Extend To All Corporate Media Liars, Thanks To Bidenflation, The Cost Of Your Family’s Thanksgiving Meal Is Still Outrageously High, and Conservative Guerrilla Marketing Like The ‘Big Based Book Sale’ Is How We Fight Leftist Gatekeepers
Mark Steyn: Rumours of War: Guadalcanal Diary and the Combat Movie, Roses of Picardy, If Ye Break Faith with Us who Die, and If at First You Don’t Succeed, Trial Trial Again

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Black Friday Deals

Category: Linkagery

But Is It ‘Actual Truth’?

Posted on | November 20, 2023 | 1 Comment

Over the weekend, I saw a lot of headlines about Elon Musk endorsing or promoting an “antisemitic conspiracy theory,” e.g.:

Advertisers Flee X as Outcry
Over Musk’s Endorsement
of Antisemitic Post Grows
— New York Times

Antisemitism was rising online.
Then Elon Musk’s X supercharged it.
— Washington Post

Ron DeSantis refuses
to condemn Elon Musk’s endorsement
of antisemitic conspiracy theory
— USA Today

The problem here is that these news reports do not include the full context — which is why I’ve posted the screenshots above — so that readers can evaluate these accusations for themselves. Before condemning someone as an anti-Semite, we ought to first look closely at the proffered evidence. What happened was that Charles Weber, a self-described Jewish conservative, issued a defiant message to “cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right,'” telling them to “say it to our faces.” The account @breakingbaht then responded to Weber’s message with a hasty post (typos suggest haste) saying that “Jewish communities” have (a) “pushed . . . dialectical hatred against whites” and (b) supported “hordes of minorities . . . flooding [western] countries.” It was by replying to @breakingbaht with his “actual truth” endorsement that Musk is alleged to have promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But there are several questions here.

First of all, how did the message from @breakingbaht come to Musk’s attention? Was the owner of The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter actually following the @breakingbaht account? Or did he see the message from someone else’s RT? This matters, because if @breakingbaht can be fairly described as an anti-Semite, what does Musk’s response say about the kinds of accounts he follows? But then again, I haven’t researched the @breakingbaht account enough to know whether he is generally anti-Jewish, or if this particular message was a one-off. He seems to be reacting to the “hordes” of immigrants participating in anti-Israel protests — an observable fact, especially in Europe — and connecting this to the alleged role of Jews in promoting both mass immigration and “dialectical hatred against whites.”

Well, are these accusations true? Is it true that, generally, “Jewish communities” support an open-borders policy that has brought “hordes of minorities” into Western countries in recent years? And is it also true that “Jewish communities” have promoted “hatred against whites”? On that latter count, I suppose @breakingbaht could be referring to what is called “critical race theory,” and readers may investigate for themselves whether Jews have generally supported or opposed this kind of “dialectical hatred.” As for the position of “Jewish communities” on immigration enforcement, again, readers can research this question on their own. However, no one can deny that certain Jewish individuals and organizations have actively opposed efforts to restrict immigration. Furthermore, exit-poll data show Jewish voters in the United States supporting Democrats over Republicans by more than a 2-to-1 margin, a fact which might attract your attention, if you consider Democrats to be the anti-white open-borders party (as perhaps you should).

So where is the antisemitism here? And where is the “conspiracy theory”? Well, on the first count, there are lots of non-Jewish people on the Left who support the harmful ideas and policies criticized by @breakingbaht, so why single out “Jewish communities”? Ah, but recall what prompted this message from @breakingbaht — Charles Weber’s complaint about anonymous “cowards” posting “Hitler was right” message online. If these anonymous Jew-haters are mainly part of the immigrant “horde,” then the actual argument being made is: Jews should stop supporting open-borders policies, which are ultimately harmful to Jews.

That is not antisemitism, but I will not be so disingenuous as to pretend I don’t know why people are concerned about what @breakingbaht posted (and Musk’s agreement with it). The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 was perpetrated by a man whose motive involved the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, an organization whose spokesman said: “As far as the migrant caravan goes, we are actively advocating for asylum seekers.”

This in turn involves what’s called “The Great Replacement,” taking its name from the title of a book by French author Renaud Camus. The problem with describing this as a “conspiracy theory” is that when you look at the facts — the impact of immigration on demographic trends — it’s hard to deny that something like this is actually happening.

You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to be concerned about the real consequences of mass immigration, and there are plenty of Jews (including many of my personal acquaintances) who are every bit as “right-wing” on this issue as any conservative Republican. Some on the Left have taken to denouncing anyone and everyone who opposes an open-borders policy as a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist, which is just as wrong in its own way as the Pittsburgh gunman’s obsession with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. There are all kinds of groups — including Quakers and Catholics and mainstream Protestants — who are part of the open-borders lobby (not to mention the Chamber of Commerce), so why the obsession with Jews? But meanwhile . . .

Why was CNN demanding that Ron DeSantis denounce Elon Musk over this? As I’ve pointed out, there are issues involved which could be cited in defense of Elon Musk’s “actual truth” message, and it is a crude over-simplication to describe Musk as having endorsed an “antisemitic conspiracy theory” and then demand that everybody denounce him.

This is why people don’t trust the media. They’re always running around looking for some kind of bogus “scandal” like this about anyone remotely conservative, and then demanding that Republican politicians denounce the targeted person. You never see them doing things like this to Democrats. Liberals get away with saying all kinds of crazy stuff, without CNN ever demanding that Democrats denounce their craziness.

Category: Israel, Racism

Rule Five Sunday: Meanwhile, In The Mountains

Posted on | November 20, 2023 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It’s been cold enough here that if this young lady was posing like this, she would have sliced her top open with her nipples. Pic courtesy of Rule 5 Texan on X.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas esse delendam.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, The Pacific, Crabs, MAGA Mistrial Motion, AI-Generated Women, Daliland, Ben Shapiro & Candace Owens – Get A Room!, The Killer, Karliene, Marion Cotillard, Christa Miller, and Shrinking.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Have a Tall One, Kyra Marie Belanger, Fish Pic Friday – Sara Briggs, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Running to the Other Side, Scott Drops Out, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News, Palm Sunday and Manchin Still Out, FBI Grabs NYC Mayor’s Phones

FLAPPR: T.I.T.S. For November 17

AVERAGE BUBBA: Rule Five Friday – Travel Edition

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: New York. Feh.

Posted on | November 19, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Not a fun week for Senators fans. We had both sets of New Yorkers in town, the Daytraders and Yankees, and we lost two out of three to both of them. Marichal got his 20th win against the Daytraders in a 7-2 laugher, and Jim Kaat held the Yankees to one run for his 13th win, but otherwise it was a string of tough losses at home. Next week, we’ll head for St. Louis for three against the Cardinals before coming home to face the Tribe on Black Friday. The rosters have expanded, but except for Randy Hundley and Richie Scheinblum, none of the rookies and spare parts are worth much. Still, we’re 79-60, 8.5 in back of Oakland and twelve games ahead of Boston in the AL West, and eight games ahead of the Angels in the race for the second wild card slot.

In other news, Juliette Ochieng, better known as Baldilocks, could use your help.

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas esse delendam.

Nobody hates New York like Bostonians and Washingtonians.

The High Price of Forgetting
The Pirate’s Cove
The Political Hat
The Daley Gator
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: One Last Glimpse Of Bikini
Animal Magnetism
Average Bubba
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL

Can You Guess Which One of These Men Is (Allegedly) a Homosexual Pedophile?
The Daley Gator
Battleswarm Blog
Flappr
357 Magnum
EBL

Still Living Rent-Free in Their Heads
The Daley Gator
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Electric Eye
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

The Strange Return of ‘Radical Chic’
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.13.23
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Secret Service Agents Open Fire on D.C. ‘Youth’ Breaking Into Their Car
The Daley Gator
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.14.23
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Not Rule 5: ‘Intersectional’ Craziness
Flappr
357 Magnum
EBL

Married, carnivorous, pro-life, athletic, heterosexual, male, combat veteran, NRA life member, stick-driving, Trump-supporting, Messianic Jew CEO awarded “ScapeGOAT”
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.15.23
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.16.23
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

Pro-Hamas ‘Liberals’ and Other Thoughts on the Binary Nature of Choices
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.17.23
A View From The Beach
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending November 17:

EBL (15)
(tied) A View From The Beach and 357 Magnum (12)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Early Black Friday Deals

Category: FMJRA Award

‘Real Wrath of God Type Stuff’

Posted on | November 18, 2023 | 1 Comment

Dr. Peter Venkman: “This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.”
Mayor: “What do you mean, ‘biblical’?”
Dr. Raymond Stantz: “What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.”
Dr. Peter Venkman: “Exactly.”
Dr. Raymond Stantz: “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!”
Dr. Egon Spengler: “Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes …”
Winston Zeddemore: “The dead rising from the grave!”
Dr. Peter Venkman: “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria!”
— Ghostbusters, 1984

What makes that scene so funny — and I still laugh at it, nearly 40 years later — is the line by Bill Murray, inserting “dogs and cats living together” in the list of cataclysms in this “wrath of God” disaster.

Compared to a rain of fire and brimstone, the unnatural cohabitation of cats and dogs seems rather trivial, see? As an example of comic screenwriting, this scene from Ghostbusters is pure genius, but what I want to connect it to is the theme of choices and consequences that I undertook to address in last night’s post (“Pro-Hamas ‘Liberals’ and Other Thoughts on the Binary Nature of Choices”). Seemingly trivial things can be indicative of larger problems, and when things go off the rails — we seem to be living through “a disaster of biblical proportions” lately — it behooves us to take note of such omens and portents, however minor they may appear when viewed in isolation.

Say hello to Tiffanie Lucas, who is jailed on $2 million bond in Bullitt County, Kentucky. Among other things, she is a bad housekeeper.

Readers may infer from the $2 million bond that Ms. Lucas is accused of wrongdoing much worse than a failure to do household chores, but it’s one of those minor things that is symptomatic of larger problems.

“Clean your room,” Dr. Jordan Peterson advises. “If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world? . . . My sense is that if you want to change the world, you start with yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way. I don’t know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can’t keep your room organized.”

What Dr. Peterson is commenting on here is the mobs of young “activists” who posture as social critics, considering themselves qualified to lecture the rest of us about the ills of society, despite the fact that their own personal lives are typically disordered and unimpressive.

A major factor in what has gone wrong with the world is that so many people aren’t doing the ordinary little things necessary to the good life — finish school, stay sober, work hard, save your money, etc.

Arguably the most important book of the 1980s, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, was widely seen as a criticism of “Great Society” programs:

“Murray’s main thesis is that social welfare programs, as they have historically been implemented in the United States, tend to increase poverty rather than decrease it because they create incentives rewarding short-sighted behavior not conducive to escaping poverty in the long term.”

However, one of the key insights Murray found from studying poverty statistics was that any young American had a 97% chance of avoiding long-term poverty if they accomplished just four simple things:

1. Get at least a high school diploma.
2. Get a job and keep working.
3. Get married and stay married.
4. Don’t have children before you’re married.

Is this too much to expect? Is this an impossible obstacle to overcome? These basic steps to success — and, if you’re born into poverty, escaping it is a major success — do not require exceptional ability, nor is their value negated by racial prejudice or other disadvantages any individual may face. However, what these steps do require are good behavioral habits, such as patience and a willingness to endure short-term difficulty in order to achieve long-term goals. Anyone who’s ever had an entry-level, low-wage job has had to deal with the common hardships involved, being bossed around while doing menial tasks. Having spent two years driving a forklift in an industrial warehouse after I’d graduated college, I’m quite familiar with the mental toughness required to endure such work.

The key point here is that, if you wish to have nice things, you must develop certain behavioral habits, and that much of what liberals decry as “oppression” is actually the consequence of bad choices made by people who failed in basic ways. What do you notice about this photograph?

Yes, of course you notice the crime-scene tape and the two police cruisers, but what else? Here’s what I see — it’s a nice neighborhood.

These aren’t some neglected old tumble-down shacks. It’s not a trailer park or a public housing complex. It’s a middle-class suburban community with relatively new homes, well-kept lawns, etc. If one of my kids purchased a home in such a prosperous-looking neighborhood, I’d consider them to have done quite well for themselves.

This home is on Bentwood Drive, in Bullitt County, Kentucky, about 15 miles south of downtown Louisville. Tiffanie Lucas lived here:

Family members told WDRB News on Tuesday that they’ve cleaned out the home she was renting. They said it was filthy, with the utilities turned off and an eviction notice on the counter.

Oh, yes, she was a bad housekeeper. She also hadn’t been paying her rent or utilities. And while this is not why she’s in jail on $2 million bond, am I the only one who thinks this information is relevant to her case?

What do we know about Bullitt County, Kentucky? Whenever the news focuses on some situation of alleged “oppression” — whether it’s in Gaza or Baltimore — the location itself is depicted as one of complete hopelessness, as if geography had decreed that no one living there had any chance at a decent life. Yet we can look at the tidy lawns on Bentwood Drive and see that this is not such a place. According to the Census Bureau, the median household income in Bullitt County is $67,892, and the median home value is $182,000. Furthermore, the population of Bullitt County is about 93% white, so it’s not the kind of place where “social justice” activists would expect to find oppression. Yet here was Tiffanie Lucas living in a house she’d rented, where she was being evicted, the utilities had been turned off and the house was “filthy.”

By now, I’m sure some curious readers have done the Google search and learned that the reason Tiffanie Lucas, 32, is being held on $2 million bond is because she is accused of murdering her two sons, ages 9 and 6.

Do some more research, and you’ll learn that Tiffanie Lucas had a history of using drugs. Also — this seems relevant — her two sons had two different fathers, and it doesn’t seem she married either one.

Perhaps now readers understand why I went on that digression about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, because Tiffanie Lucas made some choices that had consequences. Almost anyone can avoid poverty if they do a few basic things right and having children out of wedlock is a basic error which, although it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doomed, certainly suggests that your behavioral habits are problematic.

And also: “CLEAN YOUR ROOM!”

Far be it from me, with my messy desk, to hold myself up as an exemplar of tidiness, a role model of efficient housekeeping. However, when your own family denounces your house as being “filthy,” this suggests a very basic failure. We don’t know for certain if Tiffanie Lucas was on a drug binge or perhaps suffering from some kind of psychiatric problem, but it appears that it had been a long time since she did the kind of basic work necessary to keep her home livable. People make choices, and these choices lead to consequences, which may include murder and prison.

Tiffanie Lucas’ friend says
‘killer mom’ had a ‘dark side’
and would ‘flip a switch’ before
she ‘murdered her two sons’
— The Sun (U.K.)

What went wrong? Was this fate? Was it her destiny? Was there never any hope that Tiffanie Lucas could have had a better life?

When I was a young man, I was full of wild and reckless ambition. My dream was to become a multimillionaire rock star, to record a string of platinum-selling albums, tour the world, marry Brooke Shields and retire by age 30 to enjoy my wealth in a mansion on my own private island.

Readers may laugh at this, but I was very serious about it — driving a forklift in an industrial warehouse, saving up to buy a P.A. system for my band — and my idea was, “Why bother with small dreams?”

Things didn’t work out the way I’d planned, of course, and becoming a mere journalist would have once seemed to me a great disappointment, but certainly I’ve succeeded in many ways that others might envy. My lovely wife and I have raised six children and now have five grandchildren, and in my maturity, I’ve come to appreciate the value of something I once viewed with disdain, i.e., middle-class respectability.

If you asked me what I want for my children and grandchildren, that’s it in a nutshell. Becoming a reputable, law-abiding member of the bourgeoisie is a worthy goal, and achieving this goal has become more difficult than it was when I was growing up in the middle-class suburbs of Atlanta, where adults lived by the old-fashioned rules, and expected their kids to do the same. Because I was a wild and rebellious child, I chafed under the yoke of these rules, and because middle-class life seemed so ordinary — living in a place where nearly everybody was middle class — it didn’t strike me as something to dream about achieving. Somewhere in the past 50 years, however, even as I have found satisfaction in the small pleasures of bourgeois life, the old-fashioned rules of my parents’ generation have been forgotten, and society seems to be breaking down as a result. “A disaster of biblical proportions,” indeed.

Readers are welcome to draw their own inferences from the sad case of Tiffanie Lucas — why did her mother spell her name that way? — and some may find relevance in information that I have omitted, but I return to my original point, that people make choices and these choices have consequences. Failing to anticipate such cause-and-effect sequences in one’s individual life can lead to very bad outcomes. When this kind of misguided decision-making becomes commonplace in a society, when harmful behavioral patterns are so tolerated as to become normalized, the results can be catastrophic. It occurs to me that American society is approaching the point at which “mass hysteria” is to be expected.

Dr. Peter Venkman could not be reached for comment.