…Obama is one smart cookie. It would be interesting if he would write a book revealing his actual thinking.

Would Bill Ayers ghost-write it for him?

First, he sat and faced the console
Faced the glowing, humming console
Typed his login at the keyboard
Typed his password (fourteen letters)
Waited till the system answered
Waited long and cursed its slowness

Another great parody!

I’m sure some literary critic somewhere has noted that the trochaic tetrameter of The Song of Hiawatha was widely used liturgically in the Middle Ages. The Dies iræ and the Stabat mater are well known examples. These sequences were parodied just as you and F. X. Reid parody Longfellow:

Iam lucis orto sidere,
statim oportet bibere:
bibamus nunc egregie
et rebibamus hodie.

Quicunque vult esse frater,
bibat semel, bis, ter, quater:
bibat semel et secundo,
donec nihil sit in fundo.

Bibat ille, bibat illa,
bibat servus et ancilla,
bibat hera, bibat herus,
ad bibendum nemo serus.

Potatoribus pro cunctis,
pro captivis et defunctis,
pro imperatore et papa,
bibo vinum sine aqua.

Haec est fides potatica,
sociorum spes unica,
qui bene non potaverit,
salvus esse non poterit.

Longisima potatio
sit nobis salutatio:
et duret ista ratio
per infinita secula.

Amen.

Somewhere, one of Mayor Pete’s co-orientationists has founded an International Gerbiling Society. Gerbil, of course, comes from a language closely cognate with Maltese.

You remind me of a joke that was current some years ago:

Q: What did the brown gerbil say to the white gerbil?

A: “You must be new here.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Theodore Roosevelt, for example, had sterling progeny. Gandhi and Churchill, not so sterling.

Evelyn Waugh served with Randolph Churchill during World War II and knew him well. Upon reading, many years later, that surgeons had operated on Churchill to excise a benign tumor, Waugh wrote in his diary –

“A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”

Back to the 1920s.

Or perhaps earlier.

I wonder, though, whether any of the new generation of “‘Tim, Nice But Dim’ candidates whose parents can afford fees and upkeep during the three or more years” will match for pure academic unseriousness some among those of earlier days.

Think of William Randolph Hearst, Sr., who enrolled in Harvard College (class of 1885), and became a member of ΔΚΕ, the A.D. Club, Hasty Pudding, and the Lampoon staff before being expelled. As a parting gift, he sent his professors chamber pots that had their portraits painted on the insides. This is a custom that well deserves to be revived.

Then there was the newspaperman, railroad enthusiast, and bon vivant Lucius Beebe, who was expelled from Yale, completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard College, and finally managed to be expelled from graduate school at Harvard.

We can only hope!

All FBI documents and secret recordings concerning MLK.

Documents indicating that the U.S./NATO/Israel//Arab Gulf States and others knowingly backed Al Qaeda and their sympathizers in Syria, Libya and Yemen.

Documents showing how and why U.S. /Brookings created ISIS.

JFK and RFK ssassination related documents.

Early release of MLK documents if possible.

All documents related to Clinton Foundation corruption.

All documents related to communications involving Hillary’s support for Al Qaeda-linked Abdelhakim Belhaj in Libya (she deleted emails mentioning Belhaj by name up until the day Gaddafi killed). 90 undeleted emails mentioning Belhaj were received or sent by Hillary after Gaddafi dead (per Wikileaks archive).

All documents related to Biden family corruption.

Documents related to Clinton support for Islamists in the Balkans.

For starters.

The Wikileaks content. All of it. And then a full pardon of Julian Assange.

Civil war can happen only after hyperinflation accompanied with lawlessness.
And that will happen only if US looses its international position.

All that is necessary for hyperinflation to take place is for the US dollar to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency.

Uncle Sam is the world’s biggest debtor. Should interest rates return to historic norms, the entire revenue stream of the Federal government would be required to pay entitlements and the debt service.

Paying entitlements, of course, is key to preventing massive popular unrest. But paying the debt service is essential to preventing the national (and international) economy from collapsing. Banks hold bond portfolios to maintain liquidity, since bonds can be sold quickly if needed, while loans generally can’t be called. What happens when bonds can’t be sold was seen in 2008, when the bottom dropped out of the market for agency bonds (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Imagine the market crash that would take place if the bottom dropped out of the market for treasuries! This is to say nothing of the marking-to-market of the Fed’s own portfolio.

Interest rates are now low because the US government wants and needs them to be. This is made easier because they are even lower everywhere else, in some cases negative. Negative interest rates are a stratagem to drive currencies like the euro down against the dollar, thus rendering euro-denominated exports more favorably priced as against US domestic manufactures.

But should the dollar lose its reserve status, all this will change. The dollar will plunge, interest rates will rise, and the likely way out is massive inflation, so that the government can pay off cheap what it borrowed dear. This has been a common response to like circumstances in many countries. I recall being in Argentina some decades ago when its peso was inflating at a rate of 1000% a year as a result of the Peronist mismanagement of its economy. The currency had so many zeroes that you had to look quite carefully. A 50,000 peso note at the time was worth about US$4, about there price of a cab ride in Buenos Aires, and a 500,000 peso note about $40. If you weren’t attentive you might end up giving a cabbie a very generous tip.

True, but it also needs to be said those demonising today’s Christian non PC Russia are some of the same guys (or their heirs) who loved the old Soviet system(…)

They hate Russia because it apostatized from communism. That’s its unforgivable transgression.

The left’s hatred is always especially directed towards those that thwart the advance of communism, which according to Marx was destined inevitably to triumph. Proving that hypothesis wrong, though it has been done any number of times, provokes the left’s most venomous response.

Thus, for example, Pinochet, who ended Chile’s social wars and introduced Chicago-school economics, is forever anathematized as a bloody dictator, even though his repressive measures were mild compared (for example) to those of Fidel Castro, and he voluntarily stepped down when he thought his job was done.

How would you know that? George Washington supplied the cool intellect.

We know from Washington’s own private memoranda to himself that he had a hot temper. What he did was to recognize it, and having done so, practiced an iron self-restraint. Washington learnt to subdue his passions, and thus improved himself.

Self-discipline of that quality is much rarer than intellect.

Christianity had a antinomian heresy, where salvation by divine grace meant the saved were not bound to follow the moral law. This heresy is rapidly becoming our national religion.

A literary example of this type of antinomianism is the protagonist of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, who, believing himself one of God’s elect, commits all sorts of crimes, ranging from fraud to rape, and ultimately to murder. Today we might call such a person a sociopathic psychopath.

In today’s America, antinomians don’t usually commit such acts themselves. Rather, they devise intellectual arguments to justify what psychopaths (who are not themselves given to philosophical reflection) carry out in practice. Norman Mailer was an antinomian of this type; so, though with less talent, are scads of left-wing newspaper editorialists and sociology professors.

Delaware is east of the Mason-Dixon line. Make what you will of that.

Delaware was a slave state, though it did not have many enslaved blacks and never seceded. Accordingly, the Emancipation Proclamation never applied there – it had effect only in areas that were ‘in rebellion.’ Slavery persisted in Delaware until the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

It might be considered a ‘border state’ like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, except that unlike them, it did not border any state that had seceded.

We’re Minnesota not a haven for 100k Somalis plus this a hundred times over across the country, a guy like Trump would’ve never rose to power.

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016. It was already too late for his message there – enough population dilution had taken place to shift the state firmly into the blue column.

Minnesota, it should be recalled, was once a “purple” state that, though it used to elect DFL’ers like Hubert Humphrey, also elected Republican senators like Boschwitz and Durenberger, and Republican governors like Al Quie and Arne Carlson. Those days are gone.

…Jackson was despised by Thomas Jefferson and others of the VA landed gentry, it would appear that MI and WI would have more in common with the Anglican English/high churchman of the Southern aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries.

This seems incorrect to me. One of Jackson’s strongest supporters was the Virginia aristocrat John Randolph of Roanoke. He denounced the “corrupt bargain” that cheated Jackson out of the presidency in 1824 as an alliance of Blifil and Black George, two characters from Fielding’s novel Tom Jones – Blifil, the pious hypocrite, personifying the canting John Quincy Adams, and Black George, the reprobate servant of Squire Allworthy, representing Henry Clay. This so enraged Clay that he challenged Randolph to a duel, which ended bloodlessly. It is possibly the only duel in history fought over a literary allusion.

John Taylor of Caroline, also a Virginian, died before the 1824 election, but his book Arator, nominally a book on the management of plantations, argues the case against a national bank and the money power in terms almost identical to Jackson’s.

There seems to me to be little in common between the residents of Minnesota or Wisconsin and the gentry of the Tidewater. Were Minnesota not the unwilling host of 100,000+ Somalis, and a welfare haven for “tourists from Chicago,” the state would probably have been carried easily by Trump.

FYI – ‘mank’ and ‘manky’ were British slang terms used to describe stuff that was rotten, rank.

“Don’t eat that pie, it’s gone manky.”

Perhaps from the French manqué (lacking, wanting, failed, spoilt, defective, abortive).

Caracalla around 200 gave the citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire.

Roman citizenship meant less and less as it was extended to more and more people. It was not long after Caracalla’s final extension of citizenship that Diocletian abandoned the pretense of maintaining most of the ancient republican forms, and the Dominate replaced the Principate.

I suspect that we are well along the same path as Rome under the emperors just before Diocletian. Perhaps Kamala Harris, after deposing the doddering Biden, will be the first ruler of the new American Dominate.

I am a third generation owner of a family business. We employ a mixture of skilled tradesmen, sales, and clerical personnel. We operate a fully funded profit-sharing retirement plan. In the last four years some participants have seen growth of as much as 15% annually in those accounts. It has not been out of the ordinary for long-term employees to roll six-figure sums over from their profit-sharing accounts into their IRAs upon retirement.

Don’t try to tell my crew that a rising stock market has not benefited them, or to characterize their profit-sharing as “401kibble.”

Trump has done a great job as President, I agree.

So, do you really believe that:

He crushed ISIS in Syria and eliminated the caliphate there.

and that the vast majority of the poor dupes that voted for him are better off because

he brought the Dow back up to 30,000[?]

A majority of households having annual incomes between $53,000 and $99,999 own stock. By age, a majority of persons between ages 35 and 64 own stock. See:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/more-than-half-of-u-s-households-have-some-investment-in-the-stock-market/

The Dow breaking 30,000 is definitely an improvement for these people.

Anyone who promotes universal suffrage is either a stooge or a fool. If you do disagree with the elite, you want a new elite, not universal suffrage.

Thank you – how very true! All societies have élites – hierarchy is a part of human nature. The aim ought to be to have a virtuous and honorable élite, rather than a nomenklatura like the one that now so broadly prevails.

Every successful republic in history restricted the franchise in some way. In ancient Athens the only way to become a citizen entitled to the franchise was to have been born into one of the Athenian demes. Free residents who were foreigners (e.g., Aristotle) were called metics, and although they enjoyed many of the liberties, and some of the duties associated with citizenship, could not vote. Of course, large numbers of the Athenian population were slaves and had neither the liberties nor the duties of citizens.

Similarly, ancient Rome limited its citizenship and franchise, distinguishing its citizens from the subjects of its empire. The Republic of Venice, which lasted over a thousand years, with few exceptions limited its franchise to those descended from its founding population, whose names were listed in the “Golden Book.” Even the early United States limited the franchise to freeholders.

The failure of the universal franchise can be seen throughout Africa, where the departing colonial powers left their former possessions with parliaments and prime ministers, courts of law, and all the paraphernalia of modern civil government, the whole underpinned by “one man, one vote.” This slogan could well have been completed with the added words “one time,” as the new countries quickly descended into anarchy or dictatorship.

It’s interesting to note that the United States has had the universal franchise only since 1964, when the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, forbidding any tax qualification for voting, was ratified. The deterioration of American politics could well be dated to that event. It has led to the development of a class that “votes for a living” rather than working for one.

Only net taxpayers – those that foot the bill for government – ought to be able to vote. Those that receive welfare, food stamps, and other benefits at the expense of the taxpayers ought to lose their right to vote until they can show that they have again become net taxpayers over a rolling five-year period.

The Stuart pretenders haven’t had any history of residence in the British isles for three centuries. The current Stuart pretender is also the pretender to the throne of Bavaria and lives there.

The current pretender is Franz, Duke of Bavaria, born in 1933 and never married, so without heirs in the direct line.

By at least one reckoning, the third in line to the Jacobite succession is Prince Joseph Wenzel of Liechtenstein, the grandson of Hans Adam II, the reigning Prince of Liechtenstein. Joseph Wenzel was born in London in 1995 and was educated at Malvern College in Worcestershire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Joseph_Wenzel_of_Liechtenstein

Would have been nice if The Crown revealed why the royal family protected traitor and soviet spy Anthony Blunt decades after his treason was discovered. Blunt was a royal bastard, ER 2s uncle, son of king George 5 and one of Queen Mary’s lifelong friends, Hilda Master Blunt.

Blunt certainly had the face of a Windsor. Compare his portrait with one of the Duke of Windsor or of Prince Charles.

It is interesting to contrast the fate of Blunt with that of another traitorous royal bastard, James Scott.

Charles II acknowledged Scott as his natural son and created him Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Doncaster, and Baron Scott of Tynedale in the Peerage of England, and made him a knight of the Garter. Yet when Monmouth later rebelled against his uncle James II and VII, he was decapitated.

Blunt’s royal parentage was apparently never acknowledged. The only title he received was a KCVO, relatively junior in the order of precedence, and when his treason became known to the British government, it was covered up. Much later when it was exposed the only consequence he suffered was the loss of his knighthood.

Because Trump doesn’t ever sit the hell down, make a long-term strategy with underlings that will work FOR him, everything is done willy-nilly, even though his heart is in the right place.

Where could he have found underlings that would “work FOR him” with both loyalty and ability?

In the private sector, this is not a challenge. My impression is that Trump thought he could find political staff as easily as he found hotel or golf-course managers. Moreover, he didn’t understand the absolute necessity of firing and replacing every hold-over from the previous administration. Obama demanded and received the resignation of every U.S. attorney immediately upon his inauguration. Trump could have benefited by this example.

In politics, matters are not at all like they are in the private sector. The typical candidate of the political establishment (whether Democrat or Republican) comes into office with a bench of “talent” (such as it is) at his disposal. Were they elected, ¡Jeb! Bush or Marco Rubio could have had this from the institutional Republican Party; so would Hillary Clinton or John Kerry from institutional Democrats. Indeed, they’d have taken this for granted.

By contrast, Trump had almost no people with knowledge of and experience in government that were prepared to be loyal to him. Much of the Republican elite (e.g., John McCain, Paul Ryan) despised him, on grounds not only of personality but also of policy. Trump made very little headway on immigration and trade because of his positions on those issues, about which establishment Democrats and Republicans alike were dismissive or hostile. He had to fall back on the Republican establishment, which predictably and deliberately failed him on his signature issues.

Trump’s greatest success has been with judicial appointments, because there he relied upon the pre-existing bank of resources available to him through the Federalist Society.

If “Trumpism” is to have any future in American politics, its devotees are going to have to cultivate the handful of experienced and knowledgeable figures from Trump’s administration – e.g., Stephen Miller – and spend the next four years building institutional strength comparable to the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation on immigration, trade, and the Chinese threat. This is true whether Trump turns out to be defeated or somehow pulls a victory out of the current post-election chaos.

…Hilaire Belloc in his book “The Great Heresies” dismisses it that there was no solid proof. Altogether he is not too harsh on Luther, instead he considers John Calvin as the real and true enemy of the Church and Christianity.

The Lutheran Reformation would probably not have taken place were it not for the invention of the printing press. First, printing permitted the mass reproduction of indulgence documents. The 31-line indulgence printed by Gutenberg is the first dated piece of printed matter (1454, with blanks for the month and date). Gutenberg was, arguably, the first business-forms printer. The availability of an easily fillable form permitted a massive expansion in the sale of indulgences compared to what would have been possible had they needed to be written out in full by scribes. D.B. Updike estimates that several million indulgences had been printed in the half-century following the invention of printing.

Second, printing enabled a great increase of literacy. Before its invention, books were rare and literacy was confined to churchmen, lawyers, and a handful of aristocrats. Printing enabled a larger number of people to become literate because they could afford books that were previously unavailable to them. The controversies over the key items of the Lutheran Reformation could and would have been dealt with internally by the pre-Reformation church prior to the invention of printing, because they would have been confined to clerics. Such arguments about the nature of the sacraments, predestination versus free will, whether the church should accumulate wealth or instead embrace poverty (as the Franciscans did), or the appropriate uses of visual art or instrumental music in the rites of the church, had been commonplace in earlier centuries, and had been disputed in the mediaeval universities or monastic orders. However, with the spread of printing, the laity began to be actively involved in these controversies, and the Roman Church lost control of them.

In support of Belloc’s point, Lutheran (and Anglican) liturgies continued to bear strong resemblances to pre-Tridentine Catholic rites well into living memory. Indeed, the 1549 Book of Common Prayer was very nearly an English translation of the old pre-Reformation Sarum Rite, and most American Episcopalians who grew up with the 1929 prayer book would not find the 1549 version very different.

Luther and the Anglican reformers were very interested in returning to the practice of “primitive Christianity.” Perhaps the earliest complete Christian liturgy surviving is the Liturgy of St. James, used by Eastern Christians of the Byzantine or Syriac rites. The form of this liturgy bears much more resemblance to those of Orthodox, pre-Tridentine Catholic, or early Lutheran and Anglican rituals than do the ceremonials of modern evangelical Protestantism – the heir of Calvin’s reform.

Calvinism was and is certainly a radically reformed Christianity compared to Lutheranism or Anglicanism. The sacramental aspects of genuine primitive Christianity are much de-emphasized in Calvinism. Baptist sects (rejected by New England’s Puritans, and exiled to what Cotton Mather called “the fag end of civilization” – Rhode Island!), along with their offshoots, such as Seventh-Day Adventists and Pentecostals, are still farther afield.

But is lex orandi necessarily lex credendi? The present state of Anglicanism, and also most of Lutheranism (excepting that of the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods), suggests that fidelity to older ritual forms is not correlated at all with credal fidelity.

Our Orthodox brethren would remind us that, since 1054, schism has begotten schism.

Ah, I see; it’s OK to make a false statement, as long as one includes a footnote that totally contradicts it.

An old technique, famously practiced by the Huguenot exile Pierre Bayle, who paid obeisance to conventional belief in the text of his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) and (recognizing that the censors would never bother to read them), hid his contradictory arguments in the footnotes .

Elementary arithmetic would convince any rational person that everyone on the planet is descended from the ancient Hebrews, and from every other Old World tribe of the day.

Start with two, then multiply by eight for each century in-between. You’re soon into the quintillions.

This would be true only if we assume all marriages or other reproductive unions were exogamous. In fact, the world population at the time of the ancient Hebrews (or any other potential progenitors) was much smaller than the number implied by such an assumption. Moreover, while there were certainly episodes of mass migration in the distant past (e.g., those of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals), most people stayed close to where they were born, and married within their respective social strata. This resulted in considerable localized inbreeding. As a consequence, different racial and ethnic types developed, the physical characteristics of which reflected a sort of family resemblance.

The past generation within which many people cease to have completely exogamous ancestry is in many cases surprisingly recent. I have found marriages of cousins in my own genealogy as late as the eighteenth century. There simply were not enough people in Britain’s North American colonies to have made such unions unlikely.

I am surprised that in an article about Jews and efforts to legitimize various forms of sexual deviancy, there is no mention of the name of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 – 1935). Hirschfeld was s German-Jewish quack doctor and “sexologist” prominent in German public life from the late nineteenth century through the Weimar Republic years.

All of the policies advocated by today’s exponents of perversion can be found nearly a century ago in Hirschfeld’s positions. He advocated repeal of laws against sodomy and abortion. In 1919 he founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, in a villa spacious enough not only to provide office space for the Institute, but also apartments for a variety of his sexual partners, friends, and associates. Says Wikipedia:

…a number of noted individuals lived for longer or shorter periods of time in the various rooms available for rent or as free accommodations in the Institute complex. Among the residents were [Christopher] Isherwood and [Francis] Turville-Petre; literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin; actress and dancer Anita Berber; Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch; Willi Münzenberg, a member of the German Parliament and a press officer for the Communist Party of Germany; Dörchen Richter, one of the first transgender patients to receive sex reassignment surgery at the Institute, and Lili Elbe. …Hirschfeld had coined the term transvestite in 1910 to describe what today would be called transgender people, and the institution became a haven for transgender people, where Hirschfeld offered them shelter from abuse, performed surgeries, and gave otherwise unemployable transgender people jobs, albeit of a menial type, mostly as “maids”.

In short, representatives of every modern politically-correct persuasion were present – from homosexuals and transsexuals to Frankfurt School adherents (Walter Benjamin) and outright communists (Bloch and Münzenberg). Münzenberg was the money-man for various leftist causes throughout the world – a sort of George Soros of the day.

Hirschfeld is also one of the persons to whom coinage of the words “racism” and “racist” has been attributed.

It is not an overstatement to credit Hirschfeld as the principal begetter of most of the preoccupations of today’s Cultural Marxist/Social Justice Warrior left.

Prinz Eugen der edle Ritter,
wollt dem Kaiser wied’rum kriegen
Stadt und Festung Belgerad!

If he had seen those “monstrous, brutalist blocks” in 1717, he might have decided they weren’t worth the effort.

I’ve found that every successful person I’ve met is a psychopath, and most others do their best to try and be one, but his poem about missing the war is a common expression of those who have been in battle.

Lee said at the battle of Fredericksburg that “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

None of those names can match that of Shitavious Cook – which is genuine:

https://herald-review.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/shitavious-cook-gets-22-years-in-shooting-pleas/article_280e78cd-3b32-510b-a980-6ea4f33b9a49.html

What do you suppose his mother was called – Gardy Loo?

About thirty years ago, I had two skilled tradesmen in my employ, father and son, whose surname was Rittenhouse. Being an amateur genealogist, I asked whether they were descendants of the Rittenhouse family of colonial Pennsylvania. They affirmed that they were, and the father brought and showed me a book documenting it. Apparently the name thus rendered is an Anglicised spelling of the original German, and all persons bearing the name so spelled are related.

This young man is in all probability a descendant in the direct male line of colonial settlers and Revolutionary patriots. It is pleasing to see that somewhere here or there, breeding is true-to-type. Would that it were more often so!

Let’s lift a glass of Rittenhouse Rye to his successful legal defense.

MS-13 was a US creation.

No, it’s not – it was a creation of Salvadoreans. If they came here and learned how to develop and exploit a U.S. market for narcotics, that was still their doing. We should never have let them come here. Chalk up another consequence of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965.

Look at where we are getting our immigrants from – mainly countries that rank much higher on their domestic murder rates than the U.S. does on its. Latin America, where narcotraficantes abound, has sent its gangbangers here to colonize a profitable market. You can take the gangbanger out of his country of origin, but you can’t take that country out of him. We’re also getting people from the Middle East, where violence is also a way of life.

I guarantee Trump’s tax returns are audited every year. There may be something there that doesn’t look good to people who don’t understand the tax system, but there won’t be anything illegal.

I think you are absolutely correct. The entire point of demanding that a political candidate release his tax returns is to facilitate demagoguery based on envy of the wealthy.

When I contemplate my own tax return, much more modest than President Trump’s, I can easily understand why he resists releasing his.

I’m an owner of a family business, serve on three other companies’ boards, and own a number of investments that report my income from them on Schedule K-1 of Form 1040. I file state income tax returns in two states. The combined package of my Federal and state forms is more than an inch thick. Because of the way municipal bond income and capital gains or losses are treated by the different jurisdictions, a different amount of taxable income is reported on the Federal return and on each of the state returns. Anyone who was not a tax accountant would have a hard time understanding how they were calculated.

I have to wonder – if my return is that complicated, how much more so is that of a billionaire with real estate all around the world and ownership in numerous companies, partnerships, and funds?

Some demagogue could easily take a few pages from such a highly complex return package and ask (for example) how does it happen that the taxpayer has reported different amounts of income to different jurisdictions? The question is simple, the answer time-consuming and technical.

The average person who has only wage income and files a short-form return will take away from the question the insinuation that something dishonest might be going on, and probably won’t even listen to the answer. On the chance he does, he likely won’t understand it.

The Hindenburg comparison is not quite apt.

Kamala Harris is positioned to become the usurper. Suitable female comparisons would be to Agrippina, scheming wife of the doddering Claudius, or Tzu-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China.

All right, here are data from the 2016 – 2017 period:

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5/rankings

The United States is well down the list in this ranking, as well.

Highest murder rate

False! Below is a listing of intentional homicide rates by country, both by total homicides and per capita. The United States is not even in the top ten by either measure.

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent-crime/Murder-rate

After such a howler, how much credence are we to put in anything else this writer says?

Your essay was my ‘recent reading.’

Broadly the antifa in Portland seem to really be a collection of different kinds of Cluster B personality disorders (…)

I was reminded in some recent reading of the aphorisms that preface The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. / The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”

Periodically we see online a collection of mug shots of antifa rioters. These are the faces of Caliban: distorted, disfigured, abnormal. The ugliness of their physiognomies is reflected in the ugliness of their behavior. Perhaps Lombroso had a point.

Kamala Harris is clearly one of the latest examples of a grande horizontale, having worked her way up in politics under (so to speak) Willie Brown.

Thinking about historical parallels among des dames du temps jadis, the one that comes immediately to my mind is Agrippina, the fourth wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. In the traditional account, Claudius was a doddering valetudinarian (just like Joe!) and the scheming Agrippina poisoned him in order to procure the succession of her son Nero.

Of course, Kamala won’t seek the succession for her son, but rather for herself. Perhaps she can get that spirit-cooking witch-woman patronized by the Podesta brothers to serve as her Locusta.

It’s interesting to note that last January the Metropolitan Opera mounted a production of Handel’s Agrippina. It was a modern-dress version, and the reviews glowed with praise, comparing it to House of Cards and other political drama “in the age of Trump.” Little did they know how apt it would turn out to be in the age of Biden. Unfortunately they missed a bet in giving the title role to a white singer. Had she been black it would sharpen the point a bit. Too bad that Leontyne Price is in her 90s snd retired.

Add to that, that there are videos, in which George Floyd says, he has – – – – – found God.

Jailhouse conversions are a well known phenomenon, so one may be permitted to entertain some scepticism about their genuineness.

Would someone who had “found God” feel a need to be high on fentanyl and meth, as Floyd was? Would he pass counterfeit banknotes minutes before his fatal encounter with the police? His conduct at the hour of his death was not that of someone in a state of grace.

So when his area remained absolutely calm and peaceful while overwhelmingly white cities like Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle burned(…)

If Ron Unz genuinely believes that Minneapolis is “overwhelmingly white,” it makes me wonder when he last visited it – the 1950s?

According to Wikipedia:

“As of the 2010 Census, the racial composition was as follows:

White: 63.8%
Black or African American: 18.6%
American Indian: 2.0%
Asian: 5.6%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.0%
Some other race: 5.6%
Two or more races: 4.4%
Hispanic or Latino (of any race): 10.5%”

In addition, Minneapolis and environs have one of the largest concentrations of Somali immigrants anywhere in the U.S. The number of Federal prosecutions for involvement of these Somali immigrants in terrorist activities has been significant, drawing attention in the New York Times and Washington Post, which seldom pay attention to goings-on in “flyover country.”

As short interest rises the downward maker pressure increases..

That should have read “As short interest rises the downward market pressure increases.”

That doesn’t work that way because China doesn’t print dollars. The currency of the US is being fully undermined by the Fed.

You miss the point. Of course, the Fed has inflated the dollar. However, there are other ways to undermine it.

A currency speculator like Soros bets against the value of a foreign currency – he has done this with both the British and the French currency – by short selling. He or his sponsor doesn’t need to “print dollars” (or pounds, or francs). All they need to do is to drive the market down in them. As short interest rises the downward maker pressure increases.. The profits come in the form of a fall in the exchange rate between the targeted currency and some other currency in which the speculator holds long positions. Encouraging instability and chaos in a nation’s politics and economy is a good way to precipitate a fall in the value of its currency or its securities.

A foreign central bank could, by its own trading activity, do the same thing, but whatever profit it made could not so easily be diverted into political activity in other countries. If, for example, China wishes to influence American politics, a perfect conduit for money to support its schemes is someone like Soros. He can make direct contributions to campaigns and set up dozens of “dark money” entities to support various activities in ways that a foreign national could not.

My suggestion is that maybe Soros’s billions from currency trading were made for him with the aid of some foreign patron in the same way that Hillary Clinton’s profits from cattle futures trading were made for her with the help of her husband’s Arkansas cronies.

Who is paying for this?

The DNC?

The CCP?

Soros?

Possibly all three. They share the wish to defeat Trump this November.

Soros impresses me as the Willi Münzenberg of the twenty-first century. His modus operandi has been, like Münzenberg’s, to promote and support the left around the world, even as he has acquired the wealth to do so, not by doing anything productive, but rather by currency manipulation.

Such transactions could easily be structured to be a conduit of funds to an an agent of influence. Could this be the real source of Soros’s billions? The covert involvement of a central bank such as China’s in undermining the currency of a rival nation could be decisive, while blaming or crediting a highly visible speculator like Soros for the result would deflect attention from, and provide cover for, the primary actor and beneficiary.

Dershowitz was a local joke long ago because of his hanging around the volley ball games at the nude portion of one of the best beaches on a certain island (islands certainly are a theme here!) where hippies liked to skinny-dip and go suitless. I think the reason he was a joke was because he was obviously of out of the general age range at the nude beach.

You remind me of a friend’s joke –

Q: Why has nudism never become more popular?
A: Because most people look better with their clothes on.

The Guibourg and La Voisin of the Obama era?

For sheer creative talent, the best animated comedy voice actors are about five standard deviations to the right of the mean.

Mel Blanc died on July 10, 1989; Lawrence Olivier on the following day, July 11. At the time, the number of column inches devoted to Olivier’s obituaries was several times those given to Blanc’s, yet in terms of the number of people who had enjoyed their respective performances, Mel Blanc entertained far more, and in the long run, his will be the more widely remembered.

While I have no doubt that you are technically correct in asserting that several Oxford men were lured or bribed into working for the Soviets, we in Britain never have written or spoken about such an entity as ‘the Oxford spy ring’.

As an Oxonian friend of mine once said – “Cambridge – second in everything, save treason.”

Worth noting is that while the Court pretends to be an impartial judge of the law—“the law, ma’am, the law, and nothing but the law”—in viscerally fraught cases it acts more as a micro-legislature of last resort. Probably it shouldn’t. Certainly it does. In cases of vast emotional import, the justices rule with a moistened finger in the political wind. Thus Presidents try to pack the Court with people of their own party, exactly as in Congress, for the same reasons. It is a legislature.

Worth noting as well is that for centuries, the supreme judicial authority in Britain was held by the upper house of its legislature, the House of Lords of the Westminster Parliament. As time passed the Lords delegated their authority to a committee of their House made up of judicial professionals, the Law Lords. Just recently, the authority of the Lords as the ultimate court of appeal was hived off by act of Parliament to become a separate Supreme Court.

So, even as the British Parliament has by steps divested itself of judicial authority, our Supreme Court has effectively become a House of Lords over this country. In this, if not much else, I agree with Fred. Isn’t it odd how much, since their Revolution, the United States have empowered the least democratic branch of their government?

Saint.

Tucker Carlson’s father was the illegitimate child of teenagers adopted by a family named Carlson.

True, but immaterial to my point – Carlson’s line to St. George Tucker is maternal.

Has there ever been a full-time reporter turned president or prime minister anywhere in the world?

Benito Mussolini.

Yes!

It would be a sacrifice for him, to be sure – just as it has been for Trump, who has most likely lost money and has certainly had his name dragged though the mud.

One point about Carlson not widely appreciated is that he is a genuine descendant of America’s founding generation – indeed, of its colonial aristocracy. His Christian name, Tucker, was the surname of his ancestor St. George Tucker, a lieutenant-colonel of Virginia militia during the Revolution and afterwards a lawyer, a professor of law at the College of William and Mary, and at last a Federal judge (appointed by James Madison).

St. George Tucker married the widow Frances Bland Randolph, who by her first marriage was the mother of the Virginia statesman John Randolph of Roanoke. Through Frances Bland Randolph, Tucker Carlson is a descendant of the “red Bollings” through whom all of her living descendants may trace their ancestry to Pocahontas. Take that, Elizabeth Warren!

Here is a man whose ahnentafel is a sketch of American history.

Flooding is not covered by normal property/casualty insurance. There is a national flood insurance program that covers structures and their contents damaged by flooding for up to a maximum of $250,000.

https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program
https://www.floodsmart.gov

No private insurer covers flood damage. If you fail to buy flood insurance from the government your homeowner’s policy will not pay for the damage.

The question is, what is flood damage? Suppose your basement is flooded because of a sewer backup. If the sewer backup occurred because of general conditions of flooding – i.e., the presence of an excess of water on land, exceeding two acres or comprising more than two properties, that is normally dry – then flood insurance covers repair or replacement of the structure and its contents, up to the maximum.

On the other hand, if the sewer backup occurred because of a clogged line, rather than flooding as defined above, then that is not a flood, and damage should be covered by ordinary homeowner’s insurance.

Squabbles between insurance carriers over who is responsible for some claim are commonplace. They are all eager to collect an insured’s premiums but make themselves scarce when he makes a claim.

So now we have vast numbers of people with a piece of paper saying they are a college graduate obtained with lots of borrowed money who have found it isn’t really a golden ticket after all. Higher ed has prepped this battlespace by indoctrinating their students with the idea that society is organized against them, and when they get out into the world and find employers aren’t jumping at the chance to hire a graduate of a 3rd tier university with a major in ethnic studies, the prophecy has been fulfilled.

Not only that! The conversion of universities from centers of genuine scholarship, where young people learned how to reason, into indoctrination camps, where they are merely taught to repeat received wisdom, has been facilitated by the admission of those vast numbers of people. The great majority of them would never have been considered college material in the past. The curriculum had to be “dumbed down” to accommodate them, and to feed the growth industry that is now laughably called higher education.

Instead of the current belief that “the answer is higher ed for everyone,” a more realistic approach would have been to recognize that perhaps 10% of high-school graduates are genuinely suited by ability and drive for a traditional 4-year college education.

The old system of distribution requirements used to weed those with weaker intellects and poorer work ethics out of a college class before the junior year. Mandating that students spend the first two years of a four-year curriculum on demanding courses in foreign languages, calculus, or the history of Western civilization, was justified by bromides about a “well-rounded education,” but also had the mostly-unacknowledged function of culling the less bright or less motivated. Needless to say, this is why such requirements were unpopular with students.

That faculties and administrators conceded fifty years ago to the demand that “Western Civ has got to go” (meaning the course) goes far to explain why, today’s rioters demand that we get rid of Western civilization itself.

The trial would normally be in Hennepin County (Minneapolis), unless the defense asks for a change of venue. They might do so on the grounds that the local jury pool has been tainted.

Let us consider in light of these riots a periodic subject of Steve’s discussions – “redlining,” the often-alleged refusal of banks to lend in black neighborhoods.

Most construction, whether residential or commercial, is financed by some sort of mortgage. Even publicly-traded companies use bank borrowings to pay for real estate.

Why would any sane lender make a loan on collateral that was deteriorating in value, or that faced the probability of destruction? And if insurance against damage to or loss of the collateral is unavailable or unaffordable, that makes any loan against it impossible.

Because ordinary property and casualty insurance does not cover flooding, the Federal government operates a special flood insurance program. If you wish to mortgage a property that falls in the flood plain of a river or ocean, the lender will require you to buy flood insurance.

The only way that retailers may be able to rebuild in riot-torn areas may be for the Federal government to offer riot insurance in a manner analogous to its flood insurance program. To be actuarially sound, premiums would have to be set on a geographic basis, in proportion to the local demographics. Higher percentages of blacks in a neighborhood would necessarily call for higher riot insurance prices there, just as an area’s low elevation and proximity to bodies of water result in higher flood insurance premiums.

As the antecedent paragraph makes clear:

the St. Paul police then had an informal understanding with the local criminal community that if, during an arrest, a miscreant was compliant, he’d be treated well, but if he resisted in any way, he could expect a beating.

One of the largest factors in the police killing blacks is the propensity of black criminals for resisting arrest.

One of my uncles (now long dead) was, during the late 1930s, a young M.D. doing his residency at the old Ancker Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. He remarked to me once that the St. Paul police then had an informal understanding with the local criminal community that if, during an arrest, a miscreant was compliant, he’d be treated well, but if he resisted in any way, he could expect a beating.

The old lockup at the courthouse was on a floor accessed by a large manually-controlled elevator. Before taking the arrestee to his cell, the cops would stop the elevator between floors (where it was well-nigh soundproof) and give him a going-over with their truncheons. If they were too enthusiastic in their work, they’d have to bring the recipient down to Ancker, where the duty of patching him up not infrequently fell to my uncle.

Today it is perhaps a failure of the system to make it clear in advance to would-be malefactors, as it was back then, what the consequences of resisting arrest will be.

This is one of the characteristics of Steve Sailer: he doesen’t have the courage to be in-your-face and insult people that he hates directly, so he insults them indirectly by veiling his insults in the form of pseudo-intellectual questions, such as:

“Are female journalists feminists because they are ugly and didn’t date the quarterback in high school?” (…)

On the other hand, as my late father said years ago about the argument of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: if she thinks society has made a ‘sex object’ of her, she is very sadly mistaken.

Will antifa attempt to intimidate voters November 4th?

If they do they’ll be a day late. Election Day 2020 is November 3.

We did fine without pigs for almost all of human history.

But for almost all of history we had hangmen.

To be fair, a Jew invented the first properly automatic one

If you are thinking of Hiram Maxim, he was not a Jew. He was born in 1840 of old Puritan stock in Maine. Puritan New Englanders were fond of Old Testament names, perhaps giving rise to the misconception. Maxim was an atheist, but told this story about himself:

At the end of the last century the American inventor Hiram Maxim presented himself to the police in Petersburg, Russia. He was there to sell his new Maxim machine gun to the Czar.

“Your name is Hiram. You’re Jewish,” said the officer.
“I am not. My people were puritans,” said Maxim.
“Then what is your religion?”
“I never had need of one,” Maxim snorted.
“Well, no one can stay in Russia without a religion!”
“Very well,” Maxim replied, “Put me down as a Protestant.”
“And that,” he tells us, “is how I became a Protestant.”

https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi694.htm

Basically, the disaster of French colonialism in north Africa – which, ultimately, will kill France, is the direct result of the rivalry against France’s ancient enemy and nemesis, England.

Not entirely. French conquest of Algeria was at least in part a response to the same practices that led to the earlier American war against the Barbary pirates. Local despots made a practice of raiding Mediterranean shipping, holding the captives to ransom or selling them into slavery. This might be avoided by paying “tributes” (protection money) to these rulers. According to Wikipedia,

“The scope of corsair activity began to diminish in the latter part of the 17th century,[5] as the more powerful European navies started to compel the Barbary States to make peace and cease attacking their shipping. However, the ships and coasts of Christian states without such effective protection continued to suffer until the early 19th century. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely and the threat was largely subdued. Occasional incidents occurred, including two Barbary wars between the United States and the Barbary States, until finally terminated by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830.”

French colonization of Algeria was a manifestation not of imperialistic ambition but rather one of softness and misplaced compassion. The Romans would not have made such a mistake, choosing instead to kill or enslave the Barbary pirates as they had done with the Carthaginians. However, even in 1830 France believed in its “mission civilisatrice,” and hoped it might elevate and improve the people of its new colony. Rather than slaughter them, for decades it attempted to educate young Arabs and Berbers as if they were French children. Today France must bitterly repent such folly.

For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, the heathen Chinee is peculiar.

Youre not allowed to still be wrong about this… Your position is whats killing us.

Says someone who wedges a split infinitive between two missing apostrophes.

About twenty years ago, the highway patrol officers’ union in my state had a dispute with their agency. They had worked without a contract for more than a year.

Forbidden from striking as “essential to the public safety,” the highway patrolmen simply quit writing traffic tickets, except in cases where the violator’s behavior posed a real threat. Revenues from traffic fines went to the counties, which had budgeted for them; they declined. When the county governments were confronted with a sizeable shortfall, they pressured the state highway patrol to settle with its officers. It did.

After the statistics for the period had been compiled, it became evident that during this work slowdown, the number of traffic accidents declined noticeably.

Perhaps there’s a parallel with the Israeli doctors’ strike.

Some years ago, a white employee in the office of the mayor of Washington, D.C. used the word “niggardly” (correctly) with reference to some public expenditure. There was a huge outcry, and he was fired.

It turned out that he was gay. The D.C. gay community then mounted a hue and cry about his firing. He was re-hired.

As someone with “no dog in the fight” I found the combat between grievance groups interesting, and somewhat amusing, to observe.

Whose grievance has precedence – the negro’s or the homo’s? My view was that, in this case, the sodomite was right because he used the word in question correctly, and of course it makes no reference to the condition of negritude. However, that’s not why he was given back his job.

According to my doctor friend, TB isn’t that easy to transmit. He said somebody would have to cough almost directly in a subject’s face to transmit successfully, otherwise catching it off a carrier, while not impossible, isn’t probable.

About fifty years ago, my father served on the board of a tuberculosis sanitarium. The medical director there was a family friend, and I remember him telling us about some of his epidemiological work. It was a significant part of his professional responsibility to carry out contact tracing of patients who had come to the sanitarium for treatment.

Usually the patients’ contacts that turned out to be infected were family members, co-workers, or people that had other regular occasion for social contact. A TB outbreak in one small town, however, was puzzling, because none of those infected fell into the usual pattern. They were not related, did not work together, and did not know each other. After some investigation, the common thread was found: all of the victims went to the same barber – he was the carrier.

Based on this, a few minutes of being as close to a carrier as a barber is to his customers is sufficient to transmit TB.

There are colleges that are hospitable to conservatives. Hillsdale and Grove City don’t seem to have trouble placing their graduates with employers. Such institutions don’t have difficulty existing; they are just vastly outnumbered. My guess is that most of their graduates go on either directly to private-sector employment or to professional schools (business, law, medicine). Perhaps a person with one of their degrees would have difficulty getting into a Ph.D. program at a conventionally left-wing university.

Yellow fever, a mosquito-borne flavivirus, was inescapable in the 19th-century Deep South … The virus killed about half of all those it infected and it killed them horribly, with many victims vomiting thick black blood, the consistency and color of coffee grounds.

This end-stage symptom was known as vomito negro – I suppose that description is now considered racially insensitive.

For example, the “Betsy Ross House” which you may visit in Philadelphia is actually not Ross’s, but rather a very similar house of her neighbor which was preserved. They don’t tell you that until the end of the tour.

This reminds me of an anecdote told me decades ago by a gentleman of very distinguished colonial-stock ancestry, who had come to Philadelphia to attend the annual meeting of one of the lineage societies. Because his train had arrived several hours before the meeting began, he thought he’d use the time to do some local sightseeing. He asked the taxicab driver to take him to Betsy Ross’s house.

To this, cabbie replied “mister, haven’t you heard? We got a new police commissioner and he shut all them places down.”

In most states unemployment benefits are paid out of a multi-employer reserve fund not directly by the company.

This is true, but when an employer lays off workers, its “experience ratio” goes up. This means that its premium for unemployment insurance increases. It’s a similar situation to seeing one’s automobile insurance premium increase after having a wreck or after one has received a citation for moving violations or DUI.

In my state the entire amount paid in unemployment benefits to a laid off employee is typically recaptured from the employer through increases in premiums over about three years. If this employer laid off hundreds of workers in response to a sudden fall in demand, its unemployment compensation premium would indeed rise substantially.

The woman who did this to the girl deserves a sound beating.

No, she deserves a good hanging.

Yes, the British did invent tonic water with quinine to tide over the malaria disease in India for their soldiers and administrators, bloody geniuses.

A similar phenomenon underlay the popularity of absinthe in 19th-century France. This owed itself in good part to the use of the drink among French soldiers in Algeria to ward off malaria.

There may have been something to the belief in its efficacy. Artemisinin, which was discovered in the 1970s to be an effective agent against falciparum malaria, is present in Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood, “sweet Annie,” or petite absinthe), one of the herbs used in the drink, though much less famously so than Artemisia absinthium (wormwood or grande absinthe), its principal botanical component.

Wikipedia states that “Artemisinins are not used for malaria prevention because of the extremely short activity (half-life) of the drug. To be effective, it would have to be administered multiple times each day.” Of course, that was exactly what the French did with their absinthe!

Quinine sulphate capsules were, and may still be, occasionally prescribed for leg cramps. My late mother took them occasionally and never experienced any adverse effects.

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg proposed a similar European union under German hegemony in his Septemberprogramm 1914. Hitler and Merkel merely follow in his footsteps.

To his list of fictional Basils, Derb should add Basil Seal, the protagonist of my favorite Evelyn Waugh novel – Black Mischief.

What is really remarkable is that the Germans are basically using the EU to take control of Europe

What is even more remarkable is the similarity of the present EU is to the proposal made by Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg is his “September Programme” of 1914, in which he laid out how Europe would become an economic union under German hegemony after Germany won the then-incipient war.

It is truly amazing how Merkel has accomplished through German dominance of the EU and the European Central Bank what neither Kaiser Bill nor Uncle Adolf could accomplish mit Blut und Eisen. I recall some time ago seeing a photo of Macron and Merkel together. Merkel was seated in an overstuffed chair at a coffee table, and Macron appeared to be kneeling on the floor at her side. Even Petain never knelt before a German chancellor!

Many banks opened at 10 and closed at 3 in those days. Ideal job for married women with kids.

They opened to the public at 10 am and closed to the public at 3 pm. The staff reported to work earlier and left later – the time after closing was spent counting the tellers’ tills and recording loans made or paid during the day, so that the books could be balanced daily.