Archive for the 'Politics' Category

News from AP:

The cathedral’s rector said a “computer glitch” may have played a role in the rapidly spreading blaze that devastated the 850-year-old architectural masterpiece.

[ … ]

Paris police investigators said they believe an electrical short-circuit most likely caused the fire. It’s believed to be one of multiple leads being investigated.

Um … what?  A “computer glitch” isn’t an electrical short.  The two are very different things.  So if you think this is all from a “computer glitch,” send the coding our way.  I have readers who understand C++, and I can code in FORTRAN.  I think we can help.

I’m not getting that good warm fuzzy feeling that they’re taking this seriously and being forthcoming and honest about it.

As a brief followup to my observations on The Burning Of Notre Dame, I thought I’d point out what it would take to make me happy concerning the post-mortem and investigation.

If the investigation is conducted by local fire department folks, it’s meaningless to me.  Even if the investigation is conducted by French fire engineers, it’s still meaningless.

No offense, but I’m completely uninterested in what fire fighters have to say about what happened.  I would like to see fully independent fire engineers, preferably not French engineers, conduct a thorough investigation and publish a fully peer reviewed report, unredacted, for my review.  In this case, fully peer reviewed means yet another independent set of eyes on the problem, with full concurrence in the conclusions before they are published, except for cases where disagreement exists, with those disagreements fully outlined as part of or an appendix to the main report.

Only then will I take the investigation seriously.

The awful and childish Jake Tapper interviewed Eric Swalwell on guns.

California Rep. Eric Swalwell — a recently announced Democratic presidential candidate — said Sunday his call for a ban on assault weapons was not a step toward broader gun bans.

Based on what I heard in the video, I don’t honestly think I would ever be selected for a jury.  Any sitting around waiting in jury rooms is a waste of my time.

Military Times:

President Donald Trump said that he is considering sending even more troops to the southern U.S. border to help with security missions there, calling the situation there increasingly dangerous.

“I’m going to have to call up more military,” he said Wednesday during a roundtable with supporters in Texas related to his plans for a southern border wall and tighter immigration laws for Central and South American migrants.

Ain’t that something?  They’ll send sons of America to fight all sorts of police actions and “authorizations to use force” around the globe, but the one thing they are tasked by the constitution for doing – preventing and responding to foreign invasions – the elitists in charge call illegal under Posse Comitatus.

There’s nothing wrong with Posse Comitatus.  What’s wrong is in Washington, D.C., and the demons, gargoyles and pit vipers who ensconce there.

Ammo.com:

Hollywood has a clever way of distorting our perspective on history, and a great example of this is Western film – a movie genre we’ve all come to love. Cattle rustlers, guns blazing, outlaws running loose, and vigilantes dishing out vengeance indiscriminately. These scenes have become more synonymous with the American Frontier than Winchester and their “Cartridge That Won the West.” But these fictional tales have produced more than entertainment for over a century; they’ve also contributed to an ongoing, subtle push for gun control, all while making Hollywood millions.

Revisionist history books tell us that the “Wild West” was an anarchic period of time that was not conducive to human prosperity. Images of a Hobbesian nightmare – a life that is brutish and short – are ingrained in our consciousness thanks to decades of public schooling and violent images on the silver screen which are light on actual history and heavy on creative license.

However, individuals who believe in liberty and developing their critical thinking faculties should be skeptical of most mainstream narratives regarding history, especially American history. After all, these narratives by and large have been created by Hollywood, a legacy institution that has historically advanced politically correct content with the support of Washington in order to perpetuate the cultural status quo.

When the curtain of political correctness that’s been draped over this particular period of history is pulled back, we see a much more nuanced picture of the American Frontier. In fact, research by historians such as Peter J. Hill, Richard Shenkman, Roger D. McGrath, Terry Anderson, and W. Eugene Holland shows that this period was rather indicative of a “not so wild, Wild West.”

For the purposes of this article, the Wild West will now be referred to as the Old West. This is by no means a pedantic distinction, but rather an acknowledgment of the fact that this time period was not “wild” by any stretch of the imagination when compared to other chaotic periods in human history. Indeed, the Old West had its fair share of challenges for American settlers. But as we’ll see below, crafty settlers found ways through ingenuity and mutual cooperation – all done with very limited state interference – to create a stable order for generations to come.

So let us delve into the “not so wild, Wild West.”

The Old West was not a paradise by any stretch of the imagination. There existed conflict between groups, such as American settlers and Native American tribes, once they came in contact in the Great Plains and other parts of the frontier. This was natural due to the cultural differences that existed between these groups and the lack of defined property rights in those regions.

However, in more settled towns on the frontier, there was not as much violence as the Hollywood flicks would like you to believe. One of the most important texts disrupting this depiction of the Old West was W. Eugene Hollon’s Frontier Violence: Another Look. Hollon argued that “the Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful, and safer place than American society is today.” Additionally, historian Richard Shenkman makes the case that the popular depictions of the Old West belong more in a movie script rather than a real-life historical account.

Shenkman noted:

“Many more people have died in Hollywood Westerns than ever died on the real Frontier.”

Dodge City has become a landmark for Western movies, but its portrayal is more fiction than reality. Shenkman also dismantled the Dodge City myth:

“In the real Dodge City, for example, there were just five killings in 1878, the most homicidal year in the little town’s Frontier history: scarcely enough to sustain a typical two-hour movie.”

Well, most stuff that comes out of Hollywood is pure crap, and almost always with a purpose in mind.  Say, maybe they should start making movies about the violence in Chicago and Detroit?  May they should take a hard look at what socialist policies have done to those cities, and then turn to Venezuela for a followup, perhaps?

Don’t hold your breath.

Philly.com:

If you Google the name Jabir Kennedy, you will read about a fugitive wanted for gunning down four men, one fatally, during Christmas week 2017 in the Elmwood section of Southwest Philadelphia. You will read that the “armed and dangerous” fugitive turned himself in a week later and was charged with first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder.

Well, that’s partly because Google sucks, and partly because this is all the information the DA’s office and cops  wanted you to know.

So when the case reached its conclusion this month, there were no headlines for what turned out to be a rarity in the criminal justice system: an admitted gunman in a quadruple shooting acquitted by a jury of all charges.

Let that wash over you again.  “Assistant District Attorney Sheida Ghadiri argued during the trial that the gun Kennedy fired belonged to him, that he knew how to use it given that he shot four of the five men he fought with, and the number of bullets he fired — eight to 10 — was too many to be self-defense.”

Yes, she wanted you to die.  Self defense isn’t a right recognized by the state, at least not any more.  And God help you if you ever put yourself on the line and defend someone you don’t know who is in distress.  You see, the only agents recognized by the state for dispensing violence are those commissioned by the state to do so.  To the communist, the state is the beginning, middle and end of all things.

I have absolutely no confidence in the so-called justice system, neither judges no juries.  Fortunately, they go this one right.  They tried to convince the jury it was more complicated than that (read the rest of the article if you wish), but in the end it’s simple.  Man is made in God’s image and thus has a solemn duty before the Almighty to defend his life.

Via WRSA and Instapundit, this commentary from Quillette:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

This has all been going on for a very long time.  Statism and self-hatred didn’t begin in the 1960s.  It was well-ensconced into the culture by the time I matriculated.

I recall sitting in history classes at Clemson University in 1977, and rather than survey the philosophical thought that led to the American war of independence, which would have kept my attention even if I disagreed with his view, he prided himself on using every class to choose the most irrelevant and meaningless event, spending massive amounts of time doing things that were useless to the class, except for trying to convince them of the evils of colonialism or how America would have been better off with just the noble savage.

So if you ask the typical college student today to catalog how gun control preceded and enabled Idi Amin’s genocide of Christians in Uganda, or to explain the Calvinian roots of the covenant theology that led to support for the American revolution among the clergy and their sermons, he would probably be too busy talking on his cell phone to pay attention.  And if Google couldn’t answer, he won’t know.  If Google can answer, it will be a lie.

This story comes from The Epoch Times.  The full article is at the link, but the video is embedded below.  I’ve watched it all.  It’s a no-nonsense, very clinical survey of exactly what the deep state accomplished in the run up to the election to protect HRC and take down Trump.  That deep state is still in existence today, even though the senior players are different at the CIA, FBI, State Department, and so on.  The invisible leadership – the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the bankers, the IMF, remains as it always was.

Attention to the Main Stream Media.  This is called “investigative journalism.”  Your Marxist professors didn’t teach you that in journalism school.  But you too can do it.  You just have to ignore what your professors taught you, be good, be honest, be forthright, be unbiased, search for the truth, work hard, and go where the facts lead you.

It will be hard, but it’s a road you can take.