The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are surely wise enough to know not to stand too close to any American who gets into one of those moods. An angry American is more likely to “act out” than, say, your average Canadian (though perhaps less so than your average Mexican). Moreover, you needn’t have any connection to what pissed him off to catch some of the shrapnel. I was in such a mood only yesterday, for an assortment of reasons. It’s only just attenuating to holding levels as I write this.
Below are some of the stimuli and consequences.
1. Hint! Hint!
Despite my fondness for my wife Beth, usually referred to here as the C.S.O., there are times at which I ponder starting a movement to legalize uxoricide. One of those times is when she refuses to say what she really wants.
Yesterday was Beth’s birthday. It’s become a tradition on that day for me to sally forth and procure her favorite fast food for dinner. As Liberty’s Torch has a no-advertising policy – yes, yes, I did make one exception – I shan’t name the vendor. Suffice it to say that its trademark offering is Kinda Flavorful and Crispy. In recent years its menu has become fairly extensive, so I asked Beth what she would like for her evening repast.
And asked again. And again. And again.
Beth refused to be specific. It’s women’s way of setting men up for failure. Don’t let them tell you any differently. After four successive and increasingly pointed queries, all of which Beth answered with vagaries, I blew up. I started screaming at my wife that if she refused to tell me exactly what she wanted, I’d bring home franks and beans. (NB: Yes, I know you can’t get franks and beans at that particular restaurant.)
Wonder of wonders, she relented. She wrote out what she wanted on a sticky note and sent me off with a smile.
Sometimes blowing your top is the right thing to do. But use good judgment.
2. “Equality.”
When I arrived, the aforementioned fast-food restaurant was under siege by activists: not, as you would expect, from PETA or any other animal-“rights” organization, but black reparationists! What they expected to achieve there, I have no idea, but it’s not exactly material to this tale. I had to force my way through a gaggle of them to place an order. As you might have expected, a confrontation ensued. One of them started screaming into my face about “white privilege” and demanding “equality.” As nearly as I can recall its exact wording, this was my response:
“You pitiful animal. I’m smarter than you, stronger than you, richer than you, better looking than you, more moral and ethical than you, and way better armed than you. You want equality? You couldn’t reach equality with me if you lived ten thousand years. So what do you propose to do about it right here and now?”
The idiot backed off. Apparently the word has gotten out that you don’t mess with a crazy white dude, even an elderly one.
3. Interstate Competition, Like Orange Man, Bad!
I’m a lifelong New Yorker. I’m stuck here for several reasons, not the least of which is that Hercules would get a hernia from moving my library. As I’m a strongly Right-oriented freedom weenie, New York’s legal and political insanity seriously frosts my buns. But one must adjust to circumstances.
Apparently Andrew Cuomo doesn’t think he should have to adjust his policies according to their consequences:
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo requested a meeting with President Trump over tax reform that he claims is hurting his state’s revenue. He went whining about New Yorkers leaving for Florida where taxes are cheaper. Cuomo could, of course, lower taxes and stop giving free everything to foreigners in the country illegally. His meeting turned into a lecture on fracking and late-term abortion, and he came back empty-handed.The leftist Democrat went to discuss a $10,000 cap on the on federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). Cuomo is citing the provision for a drop in over $2 billion in tax revenue.
THE PRESIDENT TELLS HIM TO LOWER TAXES, FRACK AND STOP KILLING BABIES
“I told the president myself today: SALT repeal is hurting us. And if you hurt New York, you’re harming the economic engine of the nation,” he bragged after the meeting.
Typical Cuomo arrogance. New York is no longer critical to the American economy. It retains a degree of prominence in fashion, finance, and commercial data processing, but the outsized impact it once had on the rest of the nation faded long ago. But Cuomo still dreams of becoming president.
New York’s state income tax is very high and New York property taxes are among the highest in the nation. The SALT limitation on the federal deductibility of state and local taxes does hit New Yorkers pretty hard. So many New Yorkers, especially young adults and those who are already “of means,” are departing for less taxing vistas. The remaining population is aging rapidly, which creates a further drag on Cuomo’s cherished tax revenues.
New York is clearly well over on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. But you can’t argue something like basic economics to a left-liberal. They’ve all vowed not to let such trivia impede their “progressivism” – and Cuomo is more “progressive” than most.
4. Another Secularized Holy Day.
Saint Valentine was a Roman bishop during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. Claudius, who had the imperial ambitions common to Roman Caesars, was having trouble raising enough troops to extend the Empire’s borders. According to what records we have, the emperor, believing that marriage was the reason Roman men were unwilling to serve in the army, banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. (Either the old boy wasn’t very bright, or he regretted waking up next to his wife.)
Valentine continued to perform marriages in secret. He was found out, arrested, and imprisoned. It hardly slowed him down: while in prison he restored sight to his gaoler’s blind daughter, causing the gaoler and his entire extended household, forty-six people in total, to convert to Christianity. Upon hearing this, Claudius ordered Valentine's execution. St. Valentine left a farewell note for the gaoler’s daughter, whom he had befriended, and signed it "From Your Valentine." He was beheaded on February 14th.
The secularized version of this commemoration has it that Valentine’s Day is all about romantic love. This is a falsification of the commemorated event: Marriages in that time and place were seldom contracted for romantic reasons. The love we should properly honor is Saint Valentine’s love for his faith and his flock. No man goes willingly to his death except in service of an ideal higher than life itself.
Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for [romantic] love. – Robert A. Heinlein
5. Deliberate Destruction.
I have a number of favorite maxims, among which the following is prominent:
Now have a gander at this article:
Almost everyone that goes out to visit one of our major cities on the west coast has a similar reaction. Those that must live among the escalating decay are often numb to it, but most of those that are just in town for a visit are absolutely shocked by all of the trash, human defecation, crime and public drug use that they encounter. Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline. The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out to care. The ironic thing is that these cities are not poor. In fact, San Francisco and Seattle are among the wealthiest cities in the entire nation. So if things are falling apart this dramatically now, how bad will things get when economic conditions really start to deteriorate?
Please read it all. It’s a good survey of its kind. But the author resolutely refrains from drawing the only defensible conclusion:
And yes, those governments are all hard Left, more dramatically so than usual even for Democrats.
Once again, Gentle Readers: Reason backwards from tactics to objectives and thence to motives. The tactics are out in front of God and everybody: exorbitant taxation, ultra-luxurious welfare systems, business-hostile regulation, the decriminalization of “public nuisance” and “public decency” offenses, generally lax law enforcement, and the harboring of illegal aliens. Given the pattern Michael Snyder and others have delineated, the objective must be to produce exactly the squalor he’s observed.
So what’s the motive? Whose interests are served by widespread poverty, crime, and filth, coupled to the rapid departure of productive residents? What could those interests possibly be?
Leave your answer in the comments.
That’s all for today, I think. I have to get my blood pressure down. I’ll probably spend the day playing with my dogs and cats. It usually works.
See you tomorrow.
9 comments:
White men are slow to anger because the berserker lurks,... and everybody knows it.
Third world sheep don't question the herders.
Well, given that I'm around 30-40% Celtic, I'd have to agree - and, it's not just the men.
I'm sharing this link with everyone. Particularly the third point. "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time is enemy action."
AND the fifth.
Hope you're mellowing...
1. I keep telling "the boss" I'm not a telepath. The most common example: "Honey, I'm going to the supermarket; do you need anything?" "No." Two hours later. "I'm out of why didn't you get me some?"
It's at moments like this that I think the Kzinti were onto something.
2. NICE.
Not that the analogy is exact, but... I wear a kippa outdoors, one of the Jews who does in these parts. One fall day a few years ago I was going into the mall - had a jacket on. From behind a car pulls up and the passenger side window rolls down. Teenage twerp does a Hitler salute and says "Hey, white power, man!" I swept my hand under my jacket to my hip. "You want to rephrase that?" Eyes bugged, "GO GO GO!" and they took off. Heh. :)
On my father's side, I'm part Viking (with, according to DNA testing, part German - where the heck did that come from?). On my mother's pure Ashkenazi. My kids, 50% me and 50% Kazakh, a notable warrior people. Just because I wear a kippa and want to be peaceful doesn't mean I don't know how to be violent.
3. I've long ago come to the conclusion that I cannot argue with Liberals; someday, sooner than I expect, they'll only be good for one thing.
4. Did not know that history; thank you.
5. The motive? Hopelessness at the corruption. Spreading chaos. Remember, these people are missionaries bent on creating a Socialist Utopia on earth.
I was going to add a link to an essay where I address this exactly, but... G-d bless your blood pressure, Francis. So I won't.
(Incidentally, if I might ask, did you drop me from your blogroll?)
5. Cloward-Piven. Make a crisis at all costs to break the system and bring on communism (and the associated power).
The criminals who run our big cities into the ground do it because they hate their constituents and revel like demons in their degradation. They get a charge out of getting away with it.
One of the reasons is Old Money's distaste for New Money.
The powerful political class wants to avoid competition. The Middle Class is the bridge that connects the poor to wealthy. A family (or, in some spectacular cases, an individual) can, over time, move up from poor, to middle, to wealthy. The powerful do not like this. They prefer the perquisites of nobility and nepotism. They never made peace with the push away from hereditary aristocracy.
By destroying the productive working and middle classes, they eliminate class mobility, ensuring that there are only the very rich nobles, and the very poor slaves.
Naturally, they couch this in Marxist terms, however. They want more poverty, not less (like they say). They want less mobility, not more, like they claim. They want gated communities surrounded by festering hellholes, all the better to make them believe in their superiority. They want the maximum distance between serf and noble classes.
Marxism - especially the newer cultural variant - creates the useful idiots needed to make it happen.
Cities are dying because the people who run them hate Western culture. They hate middle class values and norms. These elites wish to do as they please. The only way they can do this is to destroy existing institutions in the belief that people will turn to the government to save them.
But governments do not create anything, they seldom preserve anything. At best, they keep the savages from the gates. But what happens when the savages are within the gates?
This is why it is the areas outside of the cities where Western civilization and values still exist.
I love my wife, but she has figured out that I don't take "hints" well, if she flat out don't tell me what she wants, she can't complain if I get something that isn't what she wanted...
Equality'''How I hate that word...whenever I hear that word I keep on thinking on the latest claptrap espousing the latest and greatest socialist idea but all don't think on account human condition....Communist in theory works well...in theory....in real life it sucks. I avoid confrontation with the subsaharan Nubian..nothing good ever comes of it...I learned my lessons a long tie ago when I was a fast food manager in a very urban setting...
the problem with the people leaving New York for lower tax havens like Florida is that they don't understand the cause and effect thing...they bring their voting pattern with them not understanding that is why New York is as jacked up as it is.
Good story on St Valentines....Didn't know that.
The big cities are run by democrats and they like the idea of the rich and poor, the rich running things and the poor accepting whatever handouts the rich dole out. the people in the cities hate the middle class and they want to have the rich and the poor like the gentry of old.
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