The Candidate For Those Who Respect Women

Headline: "Hillary supporters take down Bernie FB pages in coordinated porn attack."

From the article:

According to eyewitness reports, the pages were flooded with pornographic images in coordinated fashion and then flagged for obscene content, prompting Facebook to remove them.

"We had what looked like a kiddie porn posted in one of our groups today,” said Sanders supporter Erica Libenow, according to Heavy.com. "I reported that one. Seriously made me want to vomit.”

At least one Facebook user linked to the pro-Hillary Clinton group Bros 4 Hillary was reported to have participated in the attacks.

Kiddie porn. How is it that Hillary Clinton's supporters even have kiddie porn to use as a weapon? It's illegal even to possess (and rightly so).

The Devil You Say

John F. Kerry and his wife have millions in off-shore tax havens? That's the least surprising news story of the year.

Vietnam Marines Reuinte to Recreate Surfing Photo

It's kind of a fun photo, even.

It would be two years they would spend together, both in training in combat. Subjected to horrific conditions and intense combat two of them earned Purple Hearts- all of them carried the scars of war.

“We had the tools. We had the training,” DeVenezia said. “But nothing trains you for your first combat. Nothing. Zero.”

Following the end of their 13 month tours, the all went their separate ways and fell out of touch.

It's been fifty years, and they look pretty good all things considered.

On the Perils of Civilian Control of the Military

We all know what the advantages are. They have been drilled into us, and into the professional military, so thoroughly that -- as this author points out -- none of the flag officers have resigned in protest over Secretary Ray Mabus' savaging of the Navy and Marine Corps. The weakness created by Mabus' leadership has proven provocative, as American weakness often does:

In recent days, Russian fighter-bombers have done barrel rolls within ca. 30 feet of our planes and ships inside international waters. Such reckless behavior (no doubt part of Putin's plan to ratchet up the level of intimidation) leaves little to no room for error and focuses one's mind on the possibility of a tragic international incident, even war. But as the Army chief-of-staff testified recently before the Senate Armed Services Committee, if it ever came to war with Putin's Russia, we'd most likely get the short end of the stick.

Such is the state of America's armed forces under Barack Obama and Ray Mabus.

It would be ironic if we fell into war with Russia just because of civilian control of the military -- if the fact that the particular civilians given control understood and appreciated the Navy's culture so little turned out to be the thing that brought the war. It would be a bitter irony indeed.

Bright Flash of Light

It is possible to reason to an understanding of when life begins.

In case you need a hint, though, it turns out that nature provides a big one.

Ents

Wow.

Fantasy economics

A college loses its shirt playing around with expensive, subsidized green energy initiatives. One administrator commented, "They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.” I disagree.

Status quo

Here's what Europeans say about why all the business innovation seems to be coming from the U.S. The article concludes with the interesting observation that, even in the U.S., the innovation comes disproportionately from first-generation offspring of immigrants.

When Should Felons Have Voting Rights Restored?

Hot Air has a poll on the subject. It's an interesting question, I suppose.

If laws are just, then obedience to the law is an important part of one's duty. Where laws are unjust, disobedience of the law is often obedience to duty. Any violation of the law can be said to be a felony by whoever makes the law; and in a corrupt system, they are likely to make more felonious the most virtuous violations. There will still be thieves and robbers in the worst society, but political prisoners will pay a higher price the worse the corruption becomes.

So, when should felons be allowed to vote? There's no single answer, is there? It depends on whether what they did was a crime that would be universally recognized, or a crime against the politics of the corrupt. They may be morally unfit to ever vote. They may also be your best guides.

Alphas

The Art of Manliness has a post on the subject of alpha wolves. It's insightful.

Popular culture soon took this conception of the alpha wolf, along with the whole alpha vs beta distinction, and applied it to humans — especially men. Hence, the idea that to be an alpha male, you’ve got to take no prisoners, f*** s*** up each and every day, take what’s yours, and never say sorry.

There’s just one problem with this idea.

The research it’s based on turned out to be hugely flawed....


For most of the 20th century, researchers believed that gray wolf packs formed each winter among independent and unrelated wolves that lived near each other. They had reached this conclusion from observing groups of wolves that had been taken from various zoos and thrown together in captivity.

Under these circumstances, researchers observed that wolves would organize the pack hierarchy based on physical aggression and dominance. The alpha male wolf, indeed, was the wolf that kicked ass and took names....

Instead of forming packs of unrelated individuals, in which alphas compete to rise to the top, researchers discovered that wild wolf packs actually consist of little nuclear wolf families. Wolves are in fact a generally monogamous species, in which males and females pair off and mate for life.... by virtue of being parents, and leading their “subordinate” children, the mates represent a pair of “alphas.” The alpha male, or papa wolf, sits at the top of the male hierarchy in the family and the alpha female, or mamma wolf, sits atop the female hierarchy in the family.

In other words, male alpha wolves don’t gain their status through aggression and the dominance of other males, but because the other wolves in the pack are his mate and kiddos. He’s the pack patriarch. The Pater Familias. Dear Old Dad.

And like any good family man, a male alpha wolf protects his family and treats them with kindness, generosity, and love.

I don't know why this wasn't obvious from the beginning, but it should have been. Something about the 20th century really let people buy into some strange notions about the world and how it works. Urbanization? The rise of psychology, with its assumption that our real motivations are hidden and mysterious?

Go to the Wild and you find the truth. You might die, of course. But you'll learn something.

What Did She Say?

During a Thursday discussion in Connecticut on gun violence, Hillary Clinton agreed with an audience member that “joining a gang is like having a family.” Then she suggested an alternative: “positive gangs.”

You mean like a militia?

The Suicide of a Nation

It is not like Vesuvius destroying Pompeii, writes Joel D. Hirst.

No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again....

In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.

So I wandered off. I helped Uganda recover after a 25 year civil war – emptying out the camps and getting people back living again. I helped return democracy to Mali, and cemented a national peace process. I wrote three novels. I moved, and moved, and moved again. I loved my wife; we took vacations. We visited Marrakesh, and Cairo, and Zanzibar and Portugal and the Grand Canyon. We had surgeries. I had a son. We taught our son to sit up, to crawl, to walk and to run; to sing and scream and say words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis”. To name the planets one by one, to write his name.

All the while the agonizingly slow suicide continued.

Which nation do you think he means? Read the rest.

Enter the Gladiators

Paglia again:

[College students today have] no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell. If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the environment will be pure…’ – a magical utopian view that we are marching to perfection. And the sign of this progress is toleration – of the educated class – for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever.

“To me it’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilisation just before it falls: ‘we’ are very tolerant, not passionate, but there are bands of vandals and destroyers circling around the edge of our civilisation who will bring it down.”

As if to further advance the similarity between ourselves and the fall of the Roman Republic, gladiatorial games are set to resume.

Webb on Jackson

A defense of a President recently treated as indefensible:

A product of the Scots-Irish migration from war-torn Ulster into the Appalachian Mountains, his father died before he was born. His mother and both brothers died in the Revolutionary War, where he himself became a wounded combat veteran by age 13.... like other plantation owners such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, owned slaves...

As president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of presidents, including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal? Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population. Indeed, it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.

Today’s schoolchildren should know and appreciate that Jackson’s July 1832 veto of legislation renewing the charter of the monopolistic Second National Bank prevented the creation of a permanent aristocracy in our country... Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Vernon Louis Parrington called this veto “perhaps the most courageous act in our political history.”

Just as significantly, in November 1832, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. Jackson put a strong military force in position... Wisely, South Carolina did not call Jackson’s bluff, and civil war was averted for another 28 years.

Once again, I'm sorry to see that Webb didn't do better in the primary. This willingness to stand up for those normally told to shut up and sit down is refreshing.

Trump the End of Conservatism?

I've said before I'll vote for Trump if he's the nominee in order to stop Hillary. Ben Shapiro disagrees with my position.

There is an argument to be made for supporting Trump to stop Hillary. ... Hillary will be a guaranteed horror show, but she’ll be a typical corrupt leftist Democrat we can fight from the outside, not a wild-eyed tyrant with whom we must be forced into alliance. As Alexander Hamilton – you know, the guy from the musical! – once said, “If we must have an enemy at the head of government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.”

He goes on to make the case that by allying ourselves with Trump, we will be complicit in his distortions of the Conservative ethos and the hollowing out of the Conservative movement, which would do more damage than a Hillary presidency.

I don't know if Shapiro's right, or my instinct to oppose Hillary is right, or what. I'm hoping for a contested convention, but I question that as well. Shouldn't the guy with the most votes get the nomination? Do I support the kind of backroom deals I have strongly opposed in the past just to get my preferred result of someone besides Trump?

As the political season grows long, the one thing I am increasingly sure of is that this is possibly the most absurd position we could have found ourselves in.

Write-in campaign for Conan, anyone?

Common Ground for Conservatives

The Intercollegiate Review recently republished Frank S. Meyer's "What All Conservatives Can Agree On". This is from an analysis of the 1964 book What Is Conservatism? which is a collection of essays by Conservative thinkers and which Meyer edited.

He lists the following, though he goes into much more detail in the article:

1. An objective moral order

2. The human person as the center of political and social thought

3. A distaste for the use of state power to enforce ideological patterns upon human beings

4. A rejection of social engineering, or the "planned" society

5. The spirit of the Constitution of the United States as originally conceived, especially the division of powers between state and federal governments and between the three branches of the federal government

6. A devotion to Western civilization and an awareness of the need to defend it

Meyer claims the differences within Conservatism are primarily matters of emphasis. This does seem a good summary to me. Any thoughts?

On Literature

Dana Gioia (pronounced joy-uh), former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and award-winning poet, was interviewed on the Federalist Radio Hour recently. If you are interested in what has happened to the arts in the US over the last 30 years, it's an interesting interview.

Gioia is a bit of a rebel. He has criticized modern poetry as being written by professional poets for professional poets instead of for the culture. In turn, many modern poets have criticized him. He is part of a movement which tends to use traditional rhyme and meter and write to appeal to the average person, in the vein of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.

On a related note, Stephanie Cohen at Acculturated writes about schools, teachers, and others who are trying to turn back the tide of eliminating serious literature from the K-12 curriculum.

In the late 1890s, American high school English curricula regularly listed works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alexander Pope, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Daniel Webster, John Milton, William Bryant and Geoffrey Chaucer. Such authors were not just for those headed off to college. Students destined for workrooms—such as those who attended a manual training high school in Denver, Colorado—were still tasked with a similar English curriculum.

Sunday is the Ace of Spades book club day. A number of published authors read AoS, and here they are at the Book Horde. AoS has their own page at Good Reads as well, where you can see what they are currently reading (The Abolition of Man), see the votes for their next book, and, if you join, check out their bookshelf, discussions, etc.

As Breitbart was fond of saying, politics is downstream from culture.

Mattis Rejects Presidential Run, Reminds Us Why We Wanted Him

An excellent address on foreign policy, which shows a clear grasp of the issues entirely absent from the current administration. The man is tempered, serious, rational, and avoids insulting those with whom he disagrees because it isn't necessary. He's right, and they're wrong, and he knows it.

Jerusalem: Massive Greek Fortress Discovered

Now that's good news, I'd have to say.

Forgetfulness