Author: jay-dubya

Sign me up!

Sometimes someone puts your own thoughts so clearly that it would be plagiarism to try to rephrase them. With that in mind, I stand aside for John C. Wright:

I often introduce myself as a recovering libertarian. It is not an entirely serious introduction, but it is not entirely frivolous either.

Why “recovering”? Sad experience teaches that any ideology, even a sound one, like libertarianism, is intoxicating. The appeal of ideology is the appeal of elegance. Just as Newton reduced all motions from the orbits to apples falling to three expressions, every intellectual craves a simple formula to explain the human condition. Libertarianism is based on a single principle that limits the state’s use of force to retaliation against fraud and trespass.

Nearly all the natural moral rules all men carry in their hearts are satisfied by the simple rule that you may do as you like provided you leave your neighbor free to do as he likes. No neighbor may rob, defraud nor attack another.

…

For me, the intoxicating spell ended in three sharp realizations, each one as forceful as a thunderbolt.

Read the whole thing, as they say. The above is just a teaser.

I’m comfortable with where I stand, for it has come to me through brutal confrontation with the truth- truth about myself and those around me. I’m comfortable with the Bible, with G. K. Chesterton, with C. S. Lewis, with Rudyard Kipling- giants whose intellect would squash the tiny whingers of today. I accept my weakness and failure, because only that acceptance leads to truth.

Truth is in short supply today. Have any?

 

Tom Kratman, commenting at Vox Popoli:

One of the really nice things about living in an open society is that when those who most hate that society have had their way, when society – when civilization – is ruined, when it’s only a matter of time before we see children turning on spits over fires, we know _exactly_ who to drag to the lamposts, the stakes, and the crosses.

Yes, it will soon reach the point of “rope, tree, prog- some assembly required”. Read some history, it isn’t that hard to see.

Presented without comment…

…because no comment is needed.

via

 

via Gerard

Lest we forget, not so long ago-

EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariaz: “I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said:

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean.  They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.

“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

This is what happened at Mozilla yesterday.

Bryan Preston at PJ Media: (too big of a quote, but I just had to)

The IRS — the federal government — deliberately leaked confidential information on the National Organization of Marriage’s donor file to one of its enemies, the Human Rights Campaign. That leak was illegal, but no one has been sanctioned for it.

The Human Rights Campaign took its illegally-obtained booty and used it against NOM donors. That information formed the basis of the assault on Eich, via the dating site OKCupid. The company he co-founded, Mozilla, behaved like craven cowards and pressured him to resign.

Brendan Eich is not a pundit, or even a particularly political person. He invented JavaScript. I wouldn’t expect the likes of HRC to go after a pundit who publicly opposes same-sex marriage. But that isn’t and never has been the point. What they are doing is going after private citizens who oppose same-sex marriage.

What was the Chick-Fil-A battle about? It was about the company’s owner, Dan Cathy, stating his beliefs on marriage in an interview. Democrats tried to shut his company out of whole cities, to shun him and hurt him.

What was the Duck Dynasty battle about? It was about the Robertson family patriarch, Phil Robertson, stating his beliefs on life and marriage in an interview. Activists pressured A&E into taking him and his hit show off the air.

The fascists lost both of those battles, so they adjusted their tactics. The Mozilla battle saw a few employees within the company tweet their displeasure with Eich. No employees tweeted support for him or for the concept of free speech.

In both of those earlier cases, and in Eich’s, private citizens expressed their views, and the fascist mob tried to destroy them and their entire lives for it. The fascists lost the first two battles, but have won the third. Eich is gone and now Mozilla is radioactive to a large number of people. I deleted Firefox from my computers and mobile devices, and replaced it with other products. Many made similar decisions. Web browsers are easy to replace. I’m already happier with Epic and Dolphin browsers than I was with Firefox, which had become buggy and slow.

The progs don’t care what happens to Mozilla. It can live or die, they can’t be bothered about that. It doesn’t matter to them at all. They actively wanted both Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty destroyed. They would probably be content to see Mozilla die too. But it doesn’t matter to them anymore. It did what they want. They will turn and attack some other target when the opportunity arises.

The objective was not to intimidate those of us in the pundit world. On that score, the fascists’ tactic backfired — same-sex marriage supporters have been rightly appalled by all of this.

But we aren’t the target audience.

It’s setting an example- see what will happen if you cross us? Goebbels, Himmler and Speer would be proud today.

It looks like we’re close to rolling out the guillotines, folks.

Vox Day has some commentary:

And now Mozilla is out a perfectly good CTO, Eich has been humiliated and is unemployed, the left-wing lunatics have been encouraged by successfully taking a scalp, and every Christian and conservative in corporate America now knows that it is purge or be purged time. (Don’t forget, small business owners, it is legal under federal law to fire an employee for his Democratic Party affiliations.) All because the Mozilla board did not know its internal candidate well enough to realize that he lacked the backbone to be a CEO-caliber leader.

If you are, like I am, upset that the LGBT crowd has taken another scalp– Branden Eich of Mozilla, who invented Javascript- then there is a small way you can express your displeasure. Stop using Firefox. A good alternative is Pale Moon– it is a fork off the Mozilla project but is completely independent of them.

In the late Ming Dynasty in China, the eunuchs took over. No nastier bunch in world history. We’re starting to live it over again today.

 

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class is evaporating- a recipe for disaster. The whistling in the graveyard is getting louder and louder.

Cop: I’d Love to ‘Bang down Your Door and Come for Your Gun’

How would you feel if a police officer you knew for 20 years told you that if an order were issued to confiscate your guns, he wouldn’t hesitate to “kick your door in”? This was the precisely the experience Connecticut resident, Navy veteran and former firefighter John Cinque had after commenting on his state’s 2013 violation of the Second Amendment.

The law in question criminalizes the sale of magazines holding more than 10 rounds and also certain semi-automatic rifles, and mandates that all grandfathered weapons and magazines must be registered with the state. As for Cinque and the exchange with his “old friend” — Branford Police Officer Joseph Peterson — which occurred on Facebook, Mikael Thalen at Infowars.com writes:

“I’ve had contact with a police officer in my home town, I live in Branford, and his words straight out were, ‘I cannot wait to get the order to kick your door in,’” Cinque said.

…In multiple [Facebook] screenshots captured from the lengthy conversation, Peterson continually argued that law enforcement were not obligated to defy unconstitutional laws. Instead, Peterson stated that he would follow any order given, even if it meant confiscating firearms from close friends.

And to a poster named Cameron Smith, Peterson said, “I give my left n** to bang down your door and come for your gun.”

via The Woodpile Report

 

I was afraid that Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s ‘Cosmos’ was going to be less about science and space and the neat stuff that the original series enthralled me with, and more about PC thought; turns out I was right. It is more important to the Left to beat the drum of their anti-Christian scientism than it is to report fact. From a post at Patheos –

When my friend Tony Rossi posted about the cartoon about the life of Giordano Bruno that was inexplicably shoehorned into the reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series,  he received a number of negative comments. Tony had asked a few of us with a background in Church history what we thought before he wrote his post, and I told him that Bruno was emphatically not a martyr for science for the very simple reason that he was not a scientist, and that his ideas of heliocentrism and the infinite universe had little to do with his execution for heresy.

This morning, I watched the cartoon in question and took some notes. Let’s walk through what it gets right and what it gets wrong.

I’m actually not going to draw from any exotic sources for this post. I’m going to try confine what I include here only to things that can be found on the first page of a Google search for Giordano Bruno. This will illustrate more clearly the rank intellectual dishonesty involved in this segment. The truth of the story was never more than five minutes away from host Neil DeGrasse Tyson and his writers, producers, and animators. They opted to tell half-truths and outright lies instead.

This is not about education- It is propaganda. RTWT here; via the morons at AOSHQ

From the Twitter feed of Law Enforcement Today-

A little more detail on the top picture tweeted-

Not exactly Officer Friendly, are they. Seems like it didn’t used to be this way, but what do I know?

via TTAG

Somewhere in the burning pits of Hell, J. Edgar is smiling-

This week’s This American Life is an entire hour devoted to investigating the FBI’s killing of Ibragim Todashev along with a companion piece in Boston Magazine. You probably heard about the basics of the Todashev story. Todashev was a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers implicated in the Boston Marathon bombings (and the one who was killed when law enforcement tried to capture them), who was being interviewed by the FBI and was then shot multiple times and killed — with a whole variety of conflicting stories coming out soon after as to what he did to lead to his death. One of the key stories was that Todashev had just admitted to participating, with Tsarnaev, in a grisly triple homicide outside of Boston a year and half earlier, and then supposedly lunged at the FBI agents (there were a variety of different reports, each claiming he had some kind of weapon, but each time the report differed on what kind of weapon). But reporter Susan Zalkind, who had been friendly with one of the 3 men killed back in 2011, which Todashev supposedly confessed to taking part in, decided to explore the story more deeply, and found a variety of oddities at every turn, nearly all of which involve strange moves by the FBI.

How The FBI Has Been Working Hard To Deport Friends Of Guy They Killed During Interview About Boston Bombing

One hopes it is only incompetence that is being covered up. One suspects it is much, much more.

via Glenn

He sings a seductive song, for all the wrong reasons:

“Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognize everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.” – Vladimir Putin

Wow, a siren song for the Right in this country, huh? Not so fast…

In the United States, Putin’s right turn has exacerbated old divisions among its conservative intelligentsia. The reaction of some conservatives to Putin’s December speech has been positive, if not affirming. Putin’s call to return to traditional values and scorn for elites who willfully promote “abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values” compelled Pat Buchanan to wonder aloud whether Putin “was one of us?” Writing in The American Conservative, William Lind went so far as to claim that “American conservatives should welcome the resurgence of a conservative Russia.” Such praise for Putin couldn’t more strongly contrast the loathing of other American conservatives. Writing for National Review, the Stanford classicist Victor Davis Hanson compared Putin to Milton’s Satan, arguing that “he winds up existing to warn us in the West of what we are not.” Throughout the Cold War, American conservatives were predictably unified in their ideological stand against communism. Indeed, the Soviets faced few enemies as unyielding as those who shared the views of either Mr. Lind or Mr. Hanson. Evidently, Putin has divined the formula for polarizing his more traditional opponents.

— and that makes him incredibly dangerous. Even the devil can quote scripture…

Some in-depth reading here, via Classical Values