Focusing on the Most Important Things

Family – the major part of my energy for the next year will be to keep my far-flung family in my thoughts, and to show that by regularly calling, texting, emailing, and – yes – sending short notes in hard copy (there is nothing like the lift you get when you receive something in the mail WITHOUT a translucent window).  Family also includes

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Enough Part 3: Coping With The Objectors

Much of the effort that must go into saving the country will be educational: not in the conventional sense of teaching facts to people who don’t already know them (or haven’t been allowed to learn them), but in eliciting their ability to deduce logically from what they already know, and encouraging them to use it.

This is particularly important in the matter of Islam.

---

An anonymous commenter to this essay recently said:

I'm still having a hard time with universally grouping certain people who otherwise show no evil tendencies into the same group as true evil practitioners just because they were born into and raised under a particular religion. If you all are truly correct in your blanket approach, I'm sure I'll come around, because I have a lot of respect for the management and contributors here, rarely finding a word I disagree with. Meanwhile I will continue to evaluate my cautious case-by-case outlook.

I replied:

It’s like this, Anon:

1. The dictates of Islam mandate the conversion, subjugation, or death of all non-Muslims;
2. To declare oneself a Muslim is to endorse the dictates of Islam;
3. A declared Muslim therefore subscribes to that doctrine.

The usual rejoinder from people who don’t want to believe such a thing about their “nice, peaceable neighbors” always reduces either to “well, they reject that part of it” or “oh, they don’t really mean it.” Yet in every nation that has permitted Islam to gain a foothold among as much as 5% of its residents, the results have been the same:

• Demands for special privileges and accommodations on the basis of Islam;
• Disruption of public thoroughfares and events that displease Muslims;
• Brutalization of women, girls, Jews, homosexuals, and “dissidents;”
• Eventually, the establishment of Islamic exclaves (look it up) where the laws of the nation are set aside in favor of sharia.

That puts both the “reject that part” and the “don’t mean it” exculpations in the toilet where they belong.

(The Islamic doctrines of taqiyya and kitman are of particular importance to this progression. If you aren’t yet familiar with those terms, get familiar now!)

The problem, as I said in that previous piece, is Americans’ near to uniform unwillingness to believe ill of persons that have not palpably harmed them. Yet were those neighbors to style themselves Nazis – a creed which, though it lacks Islam’s theological decorations, is no more hostile to American principles than Islam is, proclaims many of the same doctrines and objectives, and indeed had the support of the highest Islamic authorities during World War II – the reaction would be diametrically the opposite, “nice, peaceable neighbors” or not. Muslims get special treatment because they claim to be following a religion.

It’s plainly high time that Americans learn to distinguish genuine religions from fake ones.

---

The strawman thrown up by many defenders of Islam (and of the continued uncritical admission of immigrats from Islamic countries) is that “we can’t deport all those people!” That, of course, has no bearing on whether the U.S. continues to admit such persons. But more to the point, deporting the estimated 3 million Muslims already in America is neither necessary nor politically desirable.

What’s required of us is:

• Heightened vigilance toward Muslims and Islamic institutions;
• Refusal to grant Muslims any privileges, whether legal or commercial, on the basis of their creed;
• Intolerance of any activity by Muslims that disrupts the peaceable, lawful activities of other Americans (e.g., blocking public thoroughfares to “pray”).

Have no doubt of it: Those measures will make some Muslims very angry. They expect to get special privileges and accommodations; when they don’t get them by merely demanding them, they tend toward more militant measures, including open lawbreaking. Were they to be treated as we would treat other Americans under the same circumstances, those incapable of adjusting to the norm would either self-deport or languish in prison. The rest could be tolerated...as long as we never, ever cease to watch them closely and admit no more of them to our nation.

It’s not cosmological physics. Hell, it’s not even rocket science.

---

Finally, Muslims are adept at fan-dancing their aims behind insincere protestations of tolerance. However, when compelled to face a sharp, yes or no question about their vicious aims and willingness to use violence to get their way, they invariably evade it:

David Horowitz is a highly experienced debater. He knows how to put an opponent on the spot – and he doesn’t hesitate to do so when the occasion demands it, even when the opponent is a sweet-looking young woman with a mouth full of “welcome.” In the above clip, perhaps the most valuable video evidence of Islam’s treachery available today, he provides a flawless demostration of the technique, with which every alert and aware American should familiarize himself.

---

To conclude: quite recently, we were blessed with a bald refutation of the old saw that “Islam means peace” by one who ought to know very well:

And also, most explicitly:

Both these clips are absolutely crucial to a clear understanding of the threat Islam represents toward the Western, Christian-Enlightenment cultures of the First World...especially that of the United States of America.

Connect the dots.

In plain sight, for Pete's sake.

Our title is a familiar locution conveying that something is achingly obvious, as obvious as a toad in your scrambled eggs. But, in fact, what is obvious to ordinary people who have to actually live with or near Muslims is an "origin of the universe"-class mystery to Western political elites, appropriately known as the Treason Elite.

This [Charlie Hebdo] attack – the deadliest terrorist attack on French soil in 50 years – may well pitch the country into profound crisis, because it crystallizes what everybody knows. France has a serious Muslim problem, a serious immigration problem and a serious terrorism problem, and the political class has no idea what to do about it. France is an easy target for Islamist terrorists because a large number of French Muslims are sympathetic to their causes.

* * * *

. . . Sixty per cent of France’s prison inmates are of “Muslim religion or culture,” and the prisons have become breeding grounds for radicalization.^[1]

French people are being relegated to the status of third-class citizens in their own country and their Treason Class is hard at work to make sure that happens. As they are everywhere in the West.

Notes
^[1] "France’s problems are in plain sight." By Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail, 1/8/15 (link omitted).

Enough Part 2: What Must Happen But Probably Won’t

Yesterday’s essay has excited a fair amount of mostly positive comment. However, some highly relevant questions should rise to the fore at this time:

• What does the threat of terrorism mean to ordinary Americans striving to go about their business in peace?
• What could be done to mitigate that threat?
• What will and what won’t be done to mitigate it?

With regard to those questions, recall the following two paragraphs of the earlier essay:

What lives in the heart that enables it to “reach” others – to commit to others’ defense, and to be confident that others are reciprocally committed? Values. A nation must be founded on either values or violence – and in either case, it must be capable of marshaling sufficient violence to defend itself and to punish those who have attacked it when the occasion demands it. But there are few values that can elicit that degree of willing commitment.

And:

Islam is massively useful to our political class. The powers that be are grateful for the threat it presents, and for the repeated evidences of that threat it provides. It serves to justify all manner of intrusions on Americans’ rights, and all manner of incursions upon our privacy. Thus, to expect that the State will ever act against Islam, regardless of how its atrocities proliferate, is a foolish notion.

The implications practically answer today’s questions all by themselves.

---

First, we must grapple with the most annoying aspect of the threat of Islam: it’s not something against which we can wield our military, especially within the borders of the United States. It’s a belief system that has adherents in practically every nation on Earth, including some three million here in the Land of the Formerly Free. Some unknown percentage of Muslims are wholly in agreement with the jihadists; these either join in jihad campaigns or willingly lend the jihadists material and emotional support.

Islam is therefore a diffuse threat: spread unevenly among more peaceable men. Science fiction writer L. Neil Smith has told us that a diffuse threat must be countered with a diffuse defense. This is entirely correct. But what does it imply?

• A heavily armed civil society;
• General recognition of the viciousness of the Islamic creed;
• Governmental measures to prevent further Islamic immigration to the U.S.

At this time, none of those three conditions are in force. American civil society is armed to some extent, but not uniformly and not continuously. Islamic terror attacks, like atrocities of other kids, tend to occur where the probability of a prompt armed response is next to zero. Indeed, our major concentrations of population tend to have the most restrictive anti-firearms laws in the nation; getting a carry permit requires extreme notoriety, political connections, or both.

Due to the reluctance of decent Americans to view nominally peaceable neighbors as potential threats, there is no general recognition of the noxiousness of Islam. In this regard, governmental sources deserve much of the blame, for their endless repetitions of the mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace” and their habitual refusal to link terrorist acts by Muslims to the creed that plainly motivates them. However, our own inclination toward a “default amiability” cannot be excluded from the mix. Time was, we knew better than to assume that an allegiant to a creed that advocates our destruction “doesn’t really mean it.”

Finally, the members of the political class, here and elsewhere, regard an armed and alert citizenry like the ninth circle of Hell. Nothing else can check their excesses. Nothing else constitutes a serious threat to their power. Nothing else can overturn an established State with a minimum spillage of blood...especially, the blood of the revolutionaries. The hostility of government to the private possession of weaponry cannot be excised from the nature of government itself: an institution that possesses the privilege of using coercive force against individuals and other institutions.

We’re batting zero for three...and the ninth inning will soon be upon us.

---

The most painful aspect of our condition has yet to be addressed: the enervation of our values.

As I wrote some time ago:

Get into your time machine, go back fifty years [i.e., to 1950 -- FWP], and walk the streets of any of the great cities of this continent. They were safe. They were almost perfectly clean. People didn't jostle one another, hurl obscene imprecations at one another, deface the sides of buildings with moronic scrawling, or pollute the air with pain-threshold levels of their preferred "music." Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection. Even the poor, of which, though they were less numerous than they are today, there was no shortage, were clean, self-reliant, self-respecting, and courteous.

The police would sort out those who couldn't meet the prevailing standards and would unceremoniously tell them to "keep moving," in which effort they were overwhelmingly reinforced by the non-uniformed public. If you wanted to surround yourself with degeneracy, you had to find the local Skid Row, the only place where such things were tolerated. It wasn't a big place, and the folks you found there permitted themselves no pride about their condition. No one indulged in nonsense notions about the "dignity" of the homeless, of welfare dependents, of drug addicts, of gang members, or any of today's mascot-groups for the coercive-compassion camp. As a result, government, which fattens on public perceptions of danger and disorder, was relatively small and unintrusive.

The American man of 1950 held to a different collection of values than does the man of 2015. He was unafraid of firearms, whether or not he owned one. He unhesitatingly supported the forces of order in their duties – and was quite appropriately shocked and angered when some member thereof shirked those duties or betrayed them for private gain. He was far more willing to put himself at risk when the occasion demanded it; indeed, a great many of the men alive at that time had done so quite recently, in Europe and the Pacific. He needed no one to tell him what deserved “tolerance” and what did not.

Men that manly and upright aren’t completely gone from our society, but they’re considerably fewer in number. In part that’s because of social devolution: parents allowing their sons to acquire bad, unmanly values, whether knowingly or otherwise. But in part it’s a consequence of governmental social-engineering programs designed to make men feel guilty about being men.

These days it takes unusual courage even to speak publicly against a threat to society. Imagine how rare is the degree of courage required to take up arms against it. That should tell you all you need to know about the pressures and constraints on our military.

In part, we’re zero for three on the conditions mentioned in the previous segment because we lack the manpower, in its exact sense, to bring them about. But that lack is not entirely the fault of today’s American man:

Throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of the rest of the First World, manhood -- masculine virtue and the self-respect that flows from it -- is being anathematized if not outlawed. Worse yet, it's been made risky to the practitioner. No aspect of male conduct is deemed too trivial to condemn. Believe it or not, there's a nation in Europe where urinating while standing up has been made into a penalizable offense. Think I'm kidding? Try it in a public loo in Germany and get back to me on the results.

Just as there is no defense, there is no Last Graf, wherein the wise and perspicacious commentator prescribes a cure for the malady. Manhood is being transformed into a liability at best, a crime at worst. Exhibiting traditional masculine virtue and civic duty in a public setting can get you arrested, brutalized or killed. Exhibiting gallantry toward a woman isn't quite as hazardous, but it's far from safe, especially if the woman is unknown to you. The "authorities," such as they are, are most definitely not on your side.

Turning that around is a prerequisite to attaining a proper stance against Islam.

---

I wish I could be more upbeat about this. It’s simply not my nature to evade, deny, or obfuscate the facts. We’re in for a rough ride. Indeed, Americans look at the one nation on Earth that’s adopted something approximating an effective posture against Islam – Israel – and recoil almost as often as they applaud. That’s hardly a harbinger of better times to come.

More anon.

This Is How You Deal With Islam

I can’t improve upon Ann Barnhardt’s technique:

It’s not hard, people. Read the Koran, if you haven’t yet. That will provide all the ammunition you need. (The intellectual ammunition, that is.)

When Will It Be Enough?

First, a critical snippet from a recent, brilliant novel:

    ”Do you know why we band together into nations, girl?”
    The question seemed so totally out of the blue that Maricel didn’t really even comprehend it. She shook her head, a gesture that meant, in this case, I don’t understand.
    Aida took it wrongly, assuming the girl meant that she didn’t know why. She answered the question herself. Pointing toward the flames, she said, “We band into nations for just that reason. In the real world, little tribes like TCS are destroyed. They can’t compete against determined bands of raiders. It takes more power than that to defend yourself against people like yourself, people with no law above themselves.”...
    “It’s the flaw in some utopian schemes,” the woman continued....“Never mind; here’s the truth, a truth I’ve been trying to find for the last...well, for a good long while. People band into nations, real nations—not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations—to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that. That’s why TCS is going to die tonight.”

Aida Farellon, the character delivering that illumination, is a semi-retired policewoman watching the military extinction of a savage band of criminals which had established a pseudo-nation – in reality, more of a “no go zone” of the sort now infesting various European states – inside the national borders of the Philippines. That band had kidnapped four members of an elite mercenary force, demanded ransom for them, and had hanged one of them because the ransom hadn’t been paid within a week. The mercenaries decided, in the author’s classic phrase, that that atrocity would be “repaid with usury.” The climax of that high-speed mass execution comes when the leader of the mercenaries announces by bullhorn:

    “Before you cocksuckers decide to hang somebody, you really need to find out first just exactly who his friends are.”

Indeed.

Who are Charlie Hebdo’s friends, Gentle Reader? Who will wreak wholesale, uncompromising vengeance upon the Islamic world for daring to produce and send forth the three savages that murdered twelve peaceable Frenchmen just yesterday?

For that matter, who are ours?

---

Aida Farellon’s assessment of the reason we form nations raises other questions, of course. For example, everything that exists has a nature that dictates, among other things, the smallest and the largest it can be and remain viable. This is surely true of nations, though determining those minimum and maximum sizes analytically is beyond Man’s current understanding. But there’s another aspect to the thing that’s implied inescapably by this statement:

“The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can.”

What lives in the heart that enables it to “reach” others – to commit to others’ defense, and to be confident that others are reciprocally committed? Values. A nation must be founded on either values or violence – and in either case, it must be capable of marshaling sufficient violence to defend itself and to punish those who have attacked it when the occasion demands it. But there are few values that can elicit that degree of willing commitment.

The United States is the very first nation ever to be founded explicitly on values: in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Had there been a shortage of men willing to stake “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” on the overriding importance of those values, the nation would never have come into existence. Should there ever be such a shortage, the nation will cease to exist, for the nations and pseudo-nations of the world founded on violence will forever cast a covetous eye on what we have built for ourselves.

An assemblage of persons who share a firm conviction in a set of ethical values – principles -- constitutes a political culture. A political culture can coexist with other cultural subvarieties, for instance artistic and culinary cultures, but never with a political culture whose principles are opposed to its own. If two such political cultures aren’t kept separate from one another, one or the other will die.

---

Islam calls itself a religion. It is not. It’s the fusion of three cultural subvarieties:

1. Theological: the statements in the Koran about Allah and Man’s relation to him;
2. Sociological: the Koran’s decrees concerning men’s relations with one another;
3. Political: the demand that Islam rule the entire world, under the legal code called sharia.

It should be plain from the previous material that Islam’s political culture cannot coexist with any other. Whenever the Islamic world has rubbed up against another political culture, it has waged war against it. Moreover, such wars have the worst characteristic of all religious wars: Islam’s warriors never admit defeat. They win, or they retreat and regroup, or they die. Yet Western nations have unanimously decided that Islam is a “religion” entitled to protection under the First Amendment, and that Muslim immigrants should be admitted to the West on an equal basis with any others.

There has never been a folly comparable to this in the history of Mankind. Yet the United States has embraced it as fully as every other nation of the First World. We call it “multiculturalism.”

The great Mark Steyn has called multiculturalism “societal Stockholm syndrome.” Indeed, the willingness of a nation to admit to its shores persons who explicitly cleave to a creed that demands that nation’s destruction is exactly parallel to the behavior of a kidnap victim that falls under the spell of his kidnappers. Now that irrefutable evidence has accumulated to a mountain that makes Everest look like a pimple, men of good will are finally massing to oppose it, particularly in Britain and France. They demand that their governments put an immediate halt to the Islamization of their nations – a process driven almost entirely by immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

The responses (and non-responses) of those governments make it clear that no such stemming of the Islamic tide is in prospect.

Why?

---

“The State is based on threat.” – Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!

I’ve written many times, including quite recently, about the importance of fear to the maintenance of political control. Our political masters, who have recently begun to feel a weakening of their grip on the U.S., need us to fear...and to turn to them for our protection.

But have another look at that list in the cited essay:

• Islamism on the march.
• Russia remilitarizing as it absorbs Ukraine and eyes the Baltics.
• China preparing its long-awaited invasion of Taiwan.
• Israel beleaguered by Middle Eastern Muslims, principally through their "Palestinian" cat's-paws.
• Hordes of illegal aliens swarming across America's southern border.
• The accelerating rise of the inflation-driven cost of living.
• The jobless "recovery."
• The surging tide of government dependency.
• Federal and state harassment of political adversaries.
• Economic strangulation by regulation.
• Judicial assaults on freedom of religion and expression.
• Vote fraud and voter intimidation.
• Resurgent union militancy.
• Rising black-on-white violence.
• The use of the "Justice" Department to prevent the prosecution of injustice.
• Deliberate weakening of our military and alienation of our allies.
• Unceasing deceit from the circles of power and their media annexes.
• Refusal to close our borders against Ebola.

Every one of those fears is either a direct and intended product of our political class’s machinations, or is something our masters have facilitated, perhaps even encouraged. Consciousness of this conspiracy against us inside the halls of power is slowly rising. Should it peak, the existing order will undergo a convulsion whose magnitude will dwarf anything in recorded history...but that assumes that it will be allowed to peak without interference from those engineering our fears.

Islam is massively useful to our political class. The powers that be are grateful for the threat it presents, and for the repeated evidences of that threat it provides. It serves to justify all manner of intrusions on Americans’ rights, and all manner of incursions upon our privacy. Thus, to expect that the State will ever act against Islam, regardless of how its atrocities proliferate, is a foolish notion.

Whether the tide of anti-Islamic sentiment in France has peaked high enough to compel the French government to close its borders, at least, to further immigration from Islamic lands will soon become clear. But it’s clear already that insufficient pressure exists in America to bring that about – never mind bringing about the degree of watchfulness over Muslims and their institutions that their savage creed deserves. What it will take to get us there is unclear...as is whether our masters would prefer to suppress us – predominantly Caucasian, predominantly Christian and Jewish Americans – rather than surrender a tool of fear they’ve found so useful in extending and consolidating their power over us.

We shall see.

Misery on a stick.

CBN bringing it home.

Can anyone name one positive thing about having Muslims in any Western country? All I can see is that as soon as Muslims achieve any kind of a critical mass they work an inevitable degradation of our culture.

Night-follows-day inevitability. Inevitability on the order of a lying, leftist MSM and of moronic college presidents. GOP sellout of the historic people of this country (dog whistle for "white people") kind of inevitability.

Why are they here amongst us? Who brought them here?

Terror in France

Anyone who says "all cultures are equally valid" is delusional. Some cultures cannot abide prosperity in others. They cannot countenance the existence of cultures other than their own.

Today, in Paris, 12 people have been murdered by Islamic terrorists. Why? Because their newspaper dared to make fun of the prophet Mohammed. In America, today, it is fashionable to make fun of Christianity and publish scare stories about how the separation of church and state is in danger from fundamentalist Christians. But say what you want about them, they didn't kill anybody when someone dropped a crucifix in a jar of piss and called it "art." Even the deplorable, universally loathed Westboro Baptists have at least avoided murder. But no, not Islam.

This isn't an isolated incident either. In France, on New Years, 940 cars were torched and riots rocked the country, mostly from Muslim minorities. This was actually considered an improvement, because last year, they torched a lot more cars. These aren't wine drinking, cheese eating French people burning cars. It's all Muslims. And why? Because the French were kind enough to let them in their country? This isn't just a French problem, either. In Sweden "youth" (the codeword for Muslim) riots are very common. Muslims are set to become 40% of the Swedish population within a decade and a half. At this rate, there won't be a Sweden in few decades. It will be a colder version of Arabia.

European prisons are full of Muslims. People talk about 'Rape Culture' in America, but in Europe, there is a real Rape Culture: Islam. But it's politically correct to regard Islam as a "religion of peace" and the terrorists as morally equivalent to the LDS guy annoying you with pamphlet literature about God.

Adam Carolla has something to say about that:

And now, Obama's press secretary delivers this little gem about the attacks in France this morning:

If it does turn out to be an act of terrorism we will condemn that in the strongest possible terms, too.

Really? "If" it turns out to be a terrorist attack? Gunmen shouting Allahu Ackbar and declaring this attack to be revenge for the depiction of Mohammad in the newspaper shoot up the newspaper office in question, and you think it "may turn out to be" a terrorist attack?

Political correctness has gone mad. Western civilization cannot even speak the truth without fear.

I'm not a fan of the French, but in this... we stand together. Wherever there is terror in the world today, the odds are strongly in favor of finding Muslims behind it. This is common sense.

First law of battles: Know thy enemy.

Then kill him.

Cross-posted at The Declination

Descent Into Chaos Part 2: The Federal Level

If you’ve been paying attention, you’re already aware of some unpleasant sequelae to the “wave” elections of November 2014:

• The reinstallation of John Boehner as Speaker of the House;
• The announcement that there will be no serious attempt by the Republican-majority Congress to thwart Obama’s anti-immigration-law-enforcement ukase or ObamaCare;
• Obama’s pre-emptive announcement of his intention to veto any legislation he dislikes that emerges from that Congress, regardless of its substance or its popularity.

At this time, even the support of Congressional Democrats for such items as the Keystone XL pipeline and the repeal of the most destructive portions of the Affordable Care Act appears to be insufficient to get those things to happen. That could change, of course, but it would take a significant shift in the attitudes and loyalties of Congressional Democrats: away from the protection of Obama and toward the performance of their duties, to say nothing of the American populace. Moreover, there would remain a chance that Obama would direct the executive agencies responsible for implementing and enforcing the laws to ignore Congressional emissions he dislikes, including ones passed by veto-proof majorities. That would require Obama’s impeachment and trial, which, given their previous support for him and his policy preferences, would test Congressional Democrats far more severely than the impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton.

The most pleasant thing one could say about Washington at this time is that at least we don’t have federal politicos exchanging gunfire inside the Capitol Building.

Yet.

---

The federal system is designed to check the powers of each of the branches of government against the willingness of the other two to approve and cooperate. From that perspective, parts of it are working according to the design...but a significant part of it – i.e., the executive’s responsibility to “take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed” – is not. Worse, that default of duty hasn’t enraged Congress sufficiently to call Obama to account for it. Considering that the Reconstruction Era Congress tried (and nearly convicted) Andrew Johnson for an offense that, by comparison, was a mere peccadillo, it should leave us with no great opinion of “our representatives” on Capitol Hill.

It becomes ever clearer that American Constitutional order is badly endangered: by the would-be dictator in the White House, by the low quality of the Representatives and Senators whose duty it is to rein him in, and by the thorough politicization of the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

One of the less-discussed things about “the rules of the game” is that the rules are the game. For Black to move his knight as if it were a bishop, smile into White’s face and say, “I have to, or I’ll lose,” is equivalent to overturning the board and scattering the pieces. This is just as true of Constitutional government as it is of chess.

I’ve written before that the enforcement agency for the Constitution’s constraints on government power and activity is the people in arms. Indeed, there could hardly be any other:

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. – Frederick Douglass

We dislike to think of the remedy of blows. It would entail violence; bloodshed; a time of even greater disorder than we endure today, regardless of the outcome. So we keep hoping that the system will right itself, if helped along by an election or two. And we continue to ratify that broken system, by implication, with our votes.

Is it not yet clear that we’ve been had? Played for fools? Soothed into believing that all can be made right by voting for the candidate with the right totem animal? Only to be told afterward that “there’s only so much we can do without the Senate / the White House / a veto-proof majority / an end to the war / and end to violence in the Middle East / a command from God” -- ?

But absent a popular uprising, the federal descent into chaos – a “system” large sectors of which ignore the rules under which they’re supposed to operate -- will continue, for a simple reason: The persons most responsible for it are getting what they want, and getting away with it.

---

Charles Krauthammer noted on yesterday’s edition of Special Report that there’s no reason to think that, for the final two years of his legitimate tenure in the Oval Office, Obama will do anything but exactly what he pleases. He need never face the voters again. He’s shown a complete indifference to popular opinion, to the Constitutional constraints on his authority, and to the ultimate consequences for his co-partisans in Congress. Nor has he ever been anything but what his upbringing and his education made him: a self-absorbed, power-obsessed social-fascist and a despiser of better, more accomplished men than he.

No ostrich tactic can blind us to the facts about Obama today. We have too much of his history to steer by. But what of Congress? Is there even a remote possibility that Obama could outrage it sufficiently to rouse it to its duties?

That’s unclear. Imagine the worst case: Obama decrees the indefinite suspension of all elections to federal offices, orders the dissolution of Congress and the Supreme Court, and declares that henceforth his word shall be the law of these United States. He mobilizes the Army, including the National Guard, and directs it to implement those decrees regardless of any and all resistance. What would follow?

Would the Army do as Obama directs?
Should a portion of the Army refuse such orders, would the remainder fire upon it?
More to the point, would Congress fulfill its Constitutional duties to remove him after such outrageous decrees?
Ultimately to the point, given his usurpations of power up to now and the flaccidity of Congress before him, would you give odds against Obama seriously considering such a move?

Stay tuned.

German government suicidal hostility to anti-Islamist protests.

Funny. When in a West German city I lived in, on almost every wall there were slogans against Capitalism and in support of the Red Army Faction, there were no counter-protests. When anarchists marched to the same slogans, there were no counter-protests. When German kids were being attacked by Muslim kids in schools in Berlin, there were no counter-protests. When Muslims chanted last Summer “Gas the Jews” in the same city, there were no counter-protests. When Christians were being decapitated by the Islamic State, there were no counter protests. And no lights were switched off on Cathedrals.

Yet now, when one group decides to protest against the media narrative and decision to flood Germany with ever more asylum seekers, many of whom will side with the decapitation, and the “Gas the Jews” chants, the whole media is alarmed, celebrities speak out, lights go out, counter-protests are everywhere and even the Chancellor has her say… does “mainstream Germany” have a death wish, or is it simply too afraid to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth?^[1]

I say it's "anti-Islam" protest but most seem to want to shy away from that truth. We shouldn't just oppose Islamists but Islam itself and all its obscurantism, hostility and savagery.

Notes
^[1] Comment by Green Infidel on "The Anti-PEGIDA Media." By Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna, 1/6/15.

Ode to the Weeping Cheeto

Ode to the Weeping Cheeto 
By SilverDeth
January 7, 2015

Courtesy of Robert Wilde at Brietbart, we are given example number 372,837,912,964 on what a fucktastic sham modern American representative governance is:

"The GOP leadership, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the consultant class of the Republican party, and all the big donors don’t understand that these people are angry. … They are saying that John Boehner doesn’t care about them, and all he cares about is the special interests. I’ve never seen anything like this in the base of a party. And that is why the analogy to the Whigs is not so far-fetched." - Pat Caddell

Read the entire article HERE.

First point of order: When we were growing up, shams were funny. Nobody seems to be laughing anymore. Not a smirk. Not a grin. Not a single solitary chuckle. What we DO see is everyone we know laying in supplies and ammunition. Things that ain't much use for enjoying a farce. This noted, cartridges and hardtack might just be helpful in rectifying one.  

Second point of order: The coddled beltway lampreys are just NOW realizing RePubicans have Whig-i-fied themselves? Newsflash to Mordor's parasite caste: The Republican Party has been a useless shambling corpse since at least 1992, and for many, longer than that. The fact of the matter is, millions and millions of Americans have no representation, and have not for the greater measure of their lives. Further, absent drastic, (probably violent) action, they won't ever get it.

We told you elections in the FUSA were a mockery in 2008. We reminded you again after you drug those useless losers into congress in 2010. We railed on our soapbox in 2012 as the "mature adults" settled for their shit-sandwich. Not content, we told you EXACTLY what would happen in the prelude to the 2014 mid-terms. We described the imminent Faustian betrayal in painful detail. And only NOW... after the Wet Tangerine once again stomps out a rebellion, are the ReThuglicans suddenly "in danger of becoming the modern Whigs?"

Finally? FINALLY? FINALLY????!  

Oh for fucks sake, we are surrounded by the blind and willfully stupid.

Washington D.C. is the modern equivalent of Gomorrah - populated by abysmal hucksters who have their heads rammed so far up their assholes their nipples double as blowholes. These shit-stains are a stomach churning combination of incompetent, selfish, clueless and irredeemably fucking evil - and there is no way we will ever be rid of them short of tossing the whole lot screaming into burn barrels.

Congratulations America. You got the government you consented to. A quarter of you love statist nannys, (Republican or Democrat, labels matter not). Another quarter think yourselves in possession of Salomon's wisdom, and "settle" for your lesser evils, hungrily chewing on Mc-shit-burgers election after election. About half of you "folks" are so terminally disconnected from reality you couldn't pick the current president from a police line-up. Of white people. All that remains is us... the vanishingly small, liberty loving patriots, who sit around shamefully scratching our heads, doing our level damnedest to figure out when the proper time to start killing these sons of bitches is.  

Newsflash to our fellow sons of liberty - it was roughly about 1914. Give or take a year.  

PS: To all the snot-bag gentry dick-suckers strutting about Faux-news and Hot-Air: We here at DETH H.Q. would like to begrudgingly congratulate Hillary Rotten-Canckles Clinton on her "historic" win in 2016. She's a Marxist hack, but hey, at least the saggy old cunt is honest about it - which - shamefully - perches her on a slightly higher rung of hell than the likes of Karl Rove or Allahpundit.

Descent To Chaos

When Rudolph Giuliani first became Mayor of New York City and decreed the implementation of the “broken window theory”-based policing practices that eventually recivilized the Big Apple, left-wing politicians and commentators throughout the world of journalism mocked and derided him for it. The general attitude of those detractors was that Giuliani didn’t know what he was talking about – worse, that his new policies would squander scarce police resources while simultaneously alienating the “minority” components of the city’s populace.

Seldom have so many with such large audiences gone so wildly wrong. But that’s not the tragedy of the thing.

Michael Bloomberg succeeded Giuliani largely on the strength of his promise to maintain Giuliani’s policing and crime-prevention policies. (It didn’t hurt Bloomberg at all that his opponent, Mark Green, is a hard-left asshole, but de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and if anyone is “politically dead,” it’s surely Mark Green.) However, Bloomberg’s adoption of nannyism as his guiding principle soon eclipsed the Giuliani legacy. After Bloomberg had spent three terms in Gracie Mansion, perpetually striving to make us sit up straight, keep our collars buttoned, and eat our brussels’ sprouts, New Yorkers were glad to see him go.

What they might not have “appreciated” was the groundwork Bloomberg laid for his successor, the Dishonorable Bill de Blasio.

Bloomberg’s meddlings in national politics were almost exclusively to the left of center. He’s probably best known for his interminable and highly expensive campaign against Second Amendment rights, but his participation in No Labels, nominally a non-partisan alliance that trends leftward in practice, has had equally large and equally pernicious effects. For some time he appeared to be positioning himself for a run at the presidency. To the relief of us in the Right, that failed to materialize. However, the worst of all Bloomberg’s misguided moves was his coddling of the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators.

The kid-glove treatment Bloomberg’s administration bestowed on the Occupiers gave a tremendous boost to the political fortunes of the Left in New York City. Among other things, it reinforced in many minds the conviction that American authorities (and Americans generally) can be intimidated into accepting that sort of disruption, and that it might be politically profitable to ramify and export it. The “children of Occupy” swiftly spread to other cities in coastal America, though they gained no purchase of significance elsewhere. The disaffection of New Yorkers with the Bloomberg administration, and with a nannyism they identified with the Right, grew in concert.

As Bloomberg’s third term entered its final year, it became clear that New York would not elect a Republican as his successor.

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Bill de Blasio’s resume makes plain that he’s no great fan of the police, or of public order as traditionally understood. His fatally misconceived statements after the death of Eric Garner merely confirmed that attitude. That they alienated the New York Police Department should have surprised no one...but it appeared to surprise De Blasio.

However, the Garner / police-alienation fracas serves best as a grace note to De Blasio’s larger problem. He inherited a city that was edging away from Giuliani’s policing policies, largely because Bloomberg’s focus was elsewhere. The consequences of the “Occupy protests,” De Blasio’s pandering to his political base, his blatant cronyism, and his immediate moves to suspend or abolish various components of the Giuliani policies have already begun to bear fruit. America’s greatest city is once again descending into chaos:

The Squeegee Man was the personification of old, dysfunctional, pre-Giuliani New York City. These guys were extortion artists, who would “help” motorists stuck in clogged automotive arteries, such as those leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, by forcing their unsolicited windshield-cleaning services on them and then demanding payment, the demand generally being accompanied by verbal abuse or the threat of violence — and, occasionally, with actual violence. Squeegee Man symbolized the disorder and lawlessness of New York life — not a murderer or a rapist, just one of the many lower-level hassles and terrors that made the city so unbearable back in what some insist on remembering as the good ol’ days of crack addicts and hookers on Times Square.

Squeegee Man is making a comeback, both in his traditional form — as documented by the New York Post — and in a new, mutant form: Sunday Hijacker. Sunday Hijacker is cleverer and more cynical than his predecessor, and his modus operandi is to make a scene inside a church during worship until somebody pays him to go away. Screaming, knocking over furnishings, and threatening violence are his shtick.

Kevin Williamson has a front-row seat to the rising tide:

The Sunday Hijacker is emblematic of a city reverting to chaos. He is not the only emblem. My own experience attests that places such as the 33rd Street subway station, the City Hall station, and Penn Station have become noticeably more disorderly over the course of the past year — more vagrancy, more filth, more people using them as camp sites. Shootings are up across the city.

And Squeegee Man is back on the job, just down the street from National Review’s offices, as it turns out. And Mayor Bill de Blasio? His main interest in office so far is trying to kill the city’s charter schools. His attention to police matters at the moment is dominated by an insurgency on his left in the wake of a homicide involving a police officer using a chokehold against NYPD regulations. Lucky for New York, the Reverend Al Sharpton is on the scene, in case anybody needs a riot incited.

Tolerate disorder and lawlessness, get more of them. Imagine that!

---

How many times must Ralph Waldo Emerson (and I) say it?

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
Justice is not postponed.
Every secret is told,
every crime is punished,
every virtue rewarded,
every wrong redressed,
in silence and certainty.

Denigrate the forces of order, and as their work is both difficult and dangerous, they will lay down their tools.
Tolerate the forces of disorder, and as their pastime offers its own peculiar rewards, they will grow jubilant and vigorous.
Encourage disruption and extortion, and as their practitioners are doubly rewarded, they will be emulated by multitudes.

It’s not cosmological physics, people. Chaos is the natural state of things. Order takes work, self-restraint, and unflagging attention to the punishment of its violators. Scamp those duties and order will vanish. It’s vanishing in New York City as we speak.

Most persons can see what’s going on there. What many can’t see – or refuse to acknowledge – is the causal connection to left-wing politics and policies. That which we subsidize will wax; that which we penalize will wane. But there, too, repetition has done little good. Too many persons are too attached to their belief that their “compassion” is a mark of superior morality and wisdom.

Urban coastal America is in crisis. Its politicians have made too many “deals with the Devil:” compromises on the maintenance of public order to placate the Left, plus panderings to those who have threatened disruption and destruction if their demands are not met. And as a moderately well-known writer has told us, “When you deal with [the Devil], notes come due in brimstone.”

Verbum sat sapienti.

Give It Up

for the Middle Eastern Christians.  There is a site that is raising money for them, by selling products with the Nasarene symbol (which is used by Muslims as a slur).

The products are ordered in groups of a minimum of 10 - I guess to promote wider awareness.  Here's the link.  They have those plastic rubber bracelets, zipper pulls, lapel pins, and car magnets.  They look pretty good for the money.

The Gathering Storm...

…all apologies to Winston Churchill, who named his 1st of the WWII books that way.

No, we in America are preparing for a Storm – of Classic Proportions.

It’s beginning to look like a CORKER – and it’s going to hit Barry’s “natural constituency”:

• Single women
• Part-time workers
• Artists, actors, musicians – anyone who works on a sporadic basis, and whose income fluctuates
• People who receive a regular paycheck, but may have received extra money outside of that – such as teachers

What is the cause of that storm?  [MORE]

This was a comment on another site

And it put me into some seriously deep thought about what is happening in this nation today:

THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
by Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

That really made me sit and think. You?

A Most Significant "Gaffe"

Has everyone finally recovered from his New Year’s Eve revel? Good. Here’s the choicest plum of the day:

A Muslim cleric who preaches from certain passages of the Koran could be caught in the “broad” net of the government’s new anti-terror law, Islamic leaders have warned.

Grand Mufti of Australia Ibrahim Abu Mohammad and the Australian National Imams Council have called for the offence of “advocating terrorism” to be removed from the so-called Foreign Fighters Bill, currently before Parliament.

Wait: haven’t we been told repeatedly that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are “moderates” who abhor terrorism just as much as any Christian? Then why...oh, I see:

It is documented the al-Qaeda handlers of the 9/11 suicide pilots had urged them to dwell on passages in the Koran in which God promises to "cast terror into the hearts of those who are bent on denying the truth; strike, then, their necks!"...

In its submission, the Islamic Council of Victoria said the new law would incriminate Muslims who support "legitimate forms of armed struggle", including resistance to the Assad regime in Syria and the Palestinian conflict with Israel....

"Criminalising the act of 'advocating terrorism' adds another layer of complexity to this issue. The scope of what constitutes 'advocating terrorism' is unclear."

The council identified what it says is a double standard in Muslims wanting to go to Syria and Iraq to provide aid having their passports cancelled "while ignoring the travel of Zionist Jews wishing to travel to Israel – a state which illegally occupies Palestinian territory with intention of fighting in a war against Gazans and has been accused of war crimes".

So when Muslims commit violence intended to terrorize others into submitting to Islam and Islamic prescriptions, it’s not terrorism, eh? But when an American Jew travels to Israel, perhaps merely as a tourist, that’s terrorism!

This is a classic gaffe in the Kinsleyan sense: “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” It’s not quite as blatant as it might have been but it’s close enough to the American standard for such things, which casts a wide and “tolerant” embrace.

Applause to Keith at Crusader Rabbit for the link.

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine comments thus:

They have a point. It’s just usually one that they aren’t willing to admit in public. The Jihad comes from the Koran. Every act of Muslim violence that is religiously sanctioned, from terrorism to rape, is derived from the Koran. If you ban incitement to violence against non-Muslims, you criminalize the Koran.

No quantity of varnish can conceal the essential facts, which appear in every copy of the Koran every printed: Islam is a violent, irrational creed designed to seduce a violent, unthinking people. It is terroristic to its core. But style such a creed a “religion” and suddenly the whole schtick about “religious freedom” and “tolerance” comes into play. Imagine what Hitler could have achieved in America had he insisted that Nazism is a religion!

There’s a reason why the majority of converts to Islam in America come from our prisons…but no one wants to think about that for very long either, do they?

A moment, please. I need more coffee.

---

One of the factors that make it possible for Muslims to propagate the lie that “Islam is a religion of peace” is the general unawareness of the chronological development of the Koran over the course of Muhammad’s life. The suras are not arranged in chronological order, but in order of their length. That conceals the time spans and correlated events that distinguish the suras from the earlier “Meccan” period, before Muhammad added violence and conversion by the sword to his “religion,” from the later “Medinan” period, when he prescribed all manner of violence, fraud, and intimidation as acceptable – even mandatory – methods for enlarging dar al Islam. Nor are Muslims happy to discuss the Islamic doctrine of naskh or abrogation, under which the later suras supersede and nullify the earlier, more tolerant ones.

The great irony here is that according to Islamic doctrine, the Koran is the perfect and inerrant word of Allah himself, has existed throughout all of time, and is not to be interpreted by human agencies! Yet it contradicts itself in more than a hundred places, and invokes naskh to do so:

"We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth [one] better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?"- Koran, Sura 2, verse 106

The naive Westerner who reads an English-language translation of the Koran is all too easily made to overlook those contradictions. Helpful imams will rationalize them away, or steer the reader’s attention in some other direction, never, ever allowing the subject of the hegira and its effects upon Muhammad’s attitudes to come into the discussion.

You cannot get a Muslim to admit that the Koran sanctifies the enslavement of non-Muslims.

You cannot get him to admit that it says that lying to a non-Muslim, or breaking one’s promises to a non-Muslim, is acceptable.

You cannot get him to allow that sharia law, the political component of Islam, decrees adultery and homosexuality to be capital crimes.

You cannot get him to admit that Islam declares women to be too inferior to men to give trustworthy testimony before a court – or that four male Muslim eyewitnesses to the act are required to sustain a charge of rape.

You cannot get him to admit that murderous violence committed by a Muslim who shouts ”Allahu Akhbar!” as he kills has any slightest connection to the Koran, to Islam, or to the goals of the worldwide Islamic movement.

That “tolerant, peaceable” Muslim neighbor of yours? The one you keep referring to whenever your “Islam means peace” notions are challenged by someone like me? How does he treat his wife and children? Where do his “charitable contributions” go? What do you know about the mosque he attends and what’s preached there? Just how certain are you, should a jihadist demand his assistance in some violent campaign, that he would staunchly refuse it, despite the peril to him and his family?

And just how certain are you, should he and his co-religionists come to be as numerous here in America as they are in Britain or France, that their aggregate behavior and influence on American society would remain as “tolerant” and “peaceable” as he seems today?

Just a few warm, fuzzy, supremely “tolerant” thoughts to kick off the New Year.

How the game is played.

It is becoming readily apparent that virtually all the money that changes hands between members of the press/business/government classes are bribes: speeches, book deals, board memberships, think-tank gigs. Our Government and elite classes are every bit as corrupt as that of Pakistan – just in a somewhat different way.^[1]

As examples of which, off the top of my head:

• Michelle Obama's ultra lucrative, half-time hospital job after BHO was elected to the Illinois State Senate. (Heck of a lawyer . . . while she still had her license.)
• Hillary Clinton's astronomical speaking fees. (Wisdom for the ages.)
• Former U.S. diplomats with responsibilities relating to Saudi Arabia ending up in lucrative think tanks (funded by S.A.) after retirement. (Vigilance against America's enemies.)

Notes
^[1]  Comment by Mr. Anon on "Promoting the Apocalypse. You'll be dead before you know it." By Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review, 12/16/14.

The Cop Conundrum

What with Ferguson, Eric Garner, and the assassinations of Liu and Ramos, we’ve certainly heard enough about the police this year...or have we?

There’s a problem here. We don’t really know, objectively, about the quality of America’s police forces or whether they use their authority generally within the parameters of the law. It’s becoming one of the most discussed subjects in the Commentariat, though the typical opinion-monger seems reluctant to come down firmly on one side or the other. Consider the following statement from our favorite Graybeard:

“On balance, though, I come down with the guys who say that most cops are not bad cops...”

Graybeard may be right, but he may be wrong – and there are institutional barriers that prevent anyone outside them from knowing which position is more accurate.

---

What is a policeman, in the American context of our time? He’s a municipal or state employee, protected by a powerful union and laws akin to those that protect civilian Civil Service employees, and effectively answerable only to his superiors in the police hierarchy. He’s been granted certain legal privileges – already we’re in murky waters – and a default presumption of justification regarding his uses of coercive force. He may have had some training in police procedure and the restrictions on his activities, though the smaller the district and its police force, the less certain that will be.

What does this policeman do? More to the point:

• What must he do?
• What may he do?
• What must he not do?

...ex officio?

The “must” part has grown very slender. Recent Supreme Court decisions have decreed that, regardless of the prevalent conceptions, the police have no “duty to protect” and no “duty to intervene.” If you deem yourself to be in danger, the problem is yours, even if the police agree with your assessment. You can be in the midst of an actual criminal victimization, yet the police have no duty to intervene to stop it or to protect you, even if they can see it happening before their own eyes.

The “may” part has become very broad. For example, numerous court decisions have ruled that all a policeman needs to detain you is “reasonable suspicion” that you are or have been involved in a crime. What constitutes “reasonable suspicion” has proved remarkably flexible. A cop who wants to search your car can simply say “I smell marijuana,” and suddenly the most invasive imaginable search is “reasonable,” no matter what his original reason was for detaining you. Regardless of any and all circumstances, you are not allowed to refuse his “lawful order” – yet another serious departure from American norms.

The “must not” part has effectively vanished. State and local police forces have become quasi-military bodies. They’ve been equipped with large amounts of military-grade hardware that no private citizen would be permitted to own. They frequently stage violent intrusions and “no-knock” raids on private institutions and private homes. Most of the time, they have court authorizations for those activities...but often on suppositions that later prove to have been wrong, or based on testimony or “evidence” that was convenient but fictitious. Despite all that, courts have ruled that persons subjected to such treatment do not have a right to resist it – that any violence committed in the process of resistance will be held against the citizen, not the police.

To these eyes, it would appear that the incentives pertaining to police and policing have headed in the wrong direction, and are rather far down the road at that.

---

The incentives of power dictate that over time, power-positions will be filled by an increasing percentage of persons who love power more than all other things. The test of power resides in its use; if you’re not using it, you can’t be certain you possess it. That would suggest that, in the two centuries since the formation of municipal police forces, the percentage of persons in police forces who are there because they love power rather than justice or public service has risen steadily.

Still, even though incentives are important, justice demands that we address the actual behavior of American police. We cannot assume that because the incentives are perverse, therefore the typical cop is merely a thug with a badge. The problem here is that without the cooperation of governmental sources, including police departments, that have a natural interest in keeping us outside their walls, determining the justice and appropriateness of police behavior is next to impossible.

For example, we are told, though not by official sources, that 1089 civilians died at police hands during 2014. Semi-official sources tell us that from 2004 through 2013, an average of 55 policemen were killed each year in the performance of their duties. The ratio might be meaningful, but stripped of context we can’t be sure. Who was doing what to whom (and why) at the time of the death in question? Such details aren’t always available...and when they are, they’re seldom complete or ironclad.

The judicial system is also involved. Consider a “no-knock” raid in which one of the occupants of the house is killed by the police...but it later emerges that the police raided the wrong house. Exactly such things have happened in recent years. Were the intruders not police, that would constitute felony murder by the plain words of the law. However, cops are almost never held to account for such events. Judicial deference to the police is seldom punctured.

All that having been said, there are surely some cops who aren’t merely thugs with badges, just as there are surely some who are that and nothing else. Our problems include both detoxifying the incentives toward thuggish behavior under color of police authority and protecting good cops from being lumped in with their not-good colleagues in blue.

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Much police misbehavior stems from bad law: the unConstitutional firearms laws, the anti-drug laws, and the many “laws” that prohibit or restrict various kinds of peaceful commerce. In such cases, it’s easy to dismiss the matter by saying the cops are “only doing their jobs.” In point of fact, police discretion is usually involved to a considerable extent. It’s almost always exercised in a fashion that favors authority...and those persons favored by the police and officialdom.

An example: Where I live, a permit is required to operate a roadside coffee truck. Also, sanitary codes apply to such trucks. Most operators stake out specific spots on particular thoroughfares. Over time, they become known to the police. Relationships develop. Some such operators are conceded something akin to property rights over the spots they habitually occupy. The police then harass others who might stake out positions they deem “too close” to their favored operators, repeatedly (sometimes several times a day) demanding to see permits, conducting “inspections,” and generally making it plainly visible to potential customers that this operator is “on the outs” with the police.

There is nothing even remotely legal about this. Yet it has become commonplace on Long Island. That a number of coffee-truck operators have family ties to the police is surely not a coincidence.

Bad laws create and intensify the incentives to bad behavior. That includes bad police behavior.

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The problem is stiff. Americans are generally disposed to believe that much of the above is unavoidable, perhaps even desirable. The rise in allegations of police misbehavior has caused rancor and tumult, but is unlikely to bring about substantial legal, judicial, or procedural changes. No outcome is certain, but the probabilities incline in the direction of an intensification of the “us versus them” attitude about the police that’s become prevalent on both sides of the “blue wall.”

There is no Last Graf. Be watchful, and wary about developments in your locale. Record any suspicious incidents in as much detail as possible. Get to know the cops who regularly appear in your neighborhood personally; personal relationships are one of the few deterrents to abuse available to the private citizen. And stay tuned.

Sen. McTerminator.

LaFaro accused the senator of engaging in the equivalent of “ethnic cleansing.” “For John McCain to have been so vindictive in his actions … It’s just amazing,” he said. “It’s been all-out war.”

More insight into the man also justly described as "Sen. McAmnesty," "Sen. Hands Across the Aisle," or the GOP's answer to Major T. J. "King" Kong.

Not the Colonel's favorite senator, let it be said.

"McCain's big purge." By Alex Isenstadt, Politico, 12/30/14.

Today's morsel of race realism.

The "why" isn't that hard to figure out but the following article is a stark description of what "is" in black America:

"Confessions of a Public Defender." By Michael Smith, American Renaissance, 5/9/14.

H/t: Nicholas Stix.