9/11 — like every great and terrible thing and event that has ever come before it — is invoked to demand and justify a wide array of ends and prove a confusing jumble of conclusions. Many of those ends and conclusions were sought by their advocates well before 9/11. It has ever been so. People will seek power, seek prominence, seek money, seek their religious and ideological goals by invoking events — by trying, as I suggested in #4 above, to blur the line between the thing and our reaction to the thing. This has been a constant theme on this blog: the government has sought more and more power over us, and more and more limitations on our rights, by invoking 9/11, only to use those new powers to fight old fights unrelated to terrorism and to suppress things they didn’t like before 9/11.

Ten Things I Want My Kids To Learn From 9/11

That day.

Never forgive. Never forget.

 

Tired of white people moving in.

Reckoning. Coming.

via Instapundit

Some thoughts from hither and yon-

If we’re living on dandelion greens and the market envies the 1932 lows, an asteroid crater where Toledo used to be, or a solar EMP that blanks out the Northeast Corridor may not rate our full attention. That’s the way it works. Maybe low-probability events are a species of self-actualizing virtual particles, they spring into being by feeding on the energy of instability itself, or perhaps in the spectrum of events there’s a slot labeled BIZARRE that must be refilled should its former contents seep into the everyday. The event itself will be an artifact of probability, its so-called inevitability a product of learned but after-the-fact Feinman diagrams. But assuming we’re among the survivors, we can’t help ourselves from considering it.

What will be our signature event? Like Rome, the aqueducts still stand but the era that built them is gone. Which suggests one event. Nations, like people, go broke secretly, then publicly and to all appearances, instantly. And we’ve been broke for a very long time. The decisive, irretrievable losses are like a corpse hidden in the ceiling, not yet acknowledged but more evident with every passing day. Perhaps our black swan will be the sheer speed of the closing act, after all, what’s to stop it, confidence in the market? The thousand-point drop in the Dow took ten minutes or near enough, and once it went vertical the next five thousand would have taken about a minute and twenty seconds longer. An automated crash of an automated rally is not a confidence builder.

Think confidence in DC will save it? It typically runs twelve per cent or so, about the same per cent as the population with an IQ of 85 or less, not coincidentally. Will the financial system itself stop it? The words financial and collapse are rarely seen very far apart of late, although we sometimes use the word collapse too freely, as past events reveal. It’s said liquidity nearly went to zero during the investment bank debacle of 2008. It was claimed at the time to be so precipitous we were within a couple of hours of an irretrievable economic implosion. An economy can’t save itself if there isn’t an economy to save.

Woodpile Report

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants and debt is the money of slaves.

The socialist ideal eventually goes viral, and the majority learns to game the system. Everyone is trying to live at the expense of everyone else. In the terminal phase, the failure of the system is disguised under a mountain of lies, hollow promises, and debts. When the stream of other people’s money runs out, the system collapses.
Kevin Brekke

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you … you may know that your society is doomed.
Ayn Rand

One small difference – When blacks run riot, their neighborhoods burn. When white men run riot, continents burn.

Cowards.

We have lost the willingness to call evil by its rightful name, and the courage to stand in the face of it and say: “No. Not here. Not on my street. Not in my city.” There is no limit to the hells men devise when no one opposes them. “What’s the point?” a Rotherham victim asked investigators. “I might as well be dead.”

The men and women who failed her might ask themselves the same question. We might all ask it. What is the point, really, in preserving our comforts—our lives, even—if to do so we must become so small, so dark-hearted, that we turn our backs on the most vulnerable among us?

I suppose none of us knows whether he will be a coward until the moment demands courage. “Be prepared in season and out of season,” the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy. As far as we are concerned, perhaps this entails recognizing that the season is upon us—an evil season, a season when children worldwide are treated like so much trash, when questions once governed by common sense are now fodder for intellectual word-play, when an army gathering under a black flag is both a reality and a metaphor, for war rages in the hearts of men, and it is coming, is here already, in our neighborhoods and our homes and our own hearts, we good and decent people who are perhaps only better than these cowards because the hour has not yet come when evil stands on our doorstep and demands entrance.

Words fail me.

But a reckoning is coming.

1400- as in 1400 molested children.

1400- the cultural timescape of the savages who did so. (Though I may be being generous.)

I like this quote from Sir Charles James Napier the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief in India in 1843, in reference to the Hindu custom of burning the widows of deceased believers-

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Call me a throwback, but my custom upon discovery of the raping of children involves a rope and a tree- at minimum. The jelly-spined Brits are so intimidated by their ‘Asian’ (I’ll say it for them- ISLAMIC) immigrants that they were arresting folk for trying to report the horror.

I wonder if we would act any differently here, in our lovely new PC world.

There is a reckoning coming.

…this is probably worth noting-

How will the world seem to you, a new cop just out of the Academy?

First, you will quickly find that the public doesn’t like you. People do not like being told what to do. They particularly do not like being punished—e.g., given a ticker—for misbehavior. Successful people of middle age do not take well to orders from a kid of twenty. They have no choice.

Next, you discover that being a cop affects your social life. People are nervous around you even when you are not in uniform. When and where does your authority stop? They aren’t sure. You probably are not either. What if someone at a party lights up a joint? Your neighbor parks in front of a fire plug? Your off-duty life comes to consist mostly of other cops. It is more comfortable that way.

Just as the public doesn’t like you, you will not much like the public. Cops do not see humanity at its best. The young woman hiking her skirt up at traffic stops.

Couples screaming obscenities at each other on domestic-violence calls. “Why don’t you catch real criminals?” The lies. The excuses. The lame attempts at manipulation. The threats (“I know the mayor.”)

As a real cop on real streets, you learn never to smile, to maintain an implied aggressiveness. When riding with a reporter, you will joke and tell stories. With the public, you will learn to be wooden-faced and authoritarian. You can’t lose your dominance or you are useless.

A few months on the streets will take the bloom off your dewy rose of morn. You will see the baby’s brains on the windshield. You will see the paramedics at the crash scene working hard on the guy who went through the windshield, pumping his chest, trying to intubate him with red gunch pouring from his mouth and no hope at all. You will find a guy lying on the sidewalk with his brains swelling like pink lips from the groove made by a nine-millimeter round, still breathing but with nowhere to go.

After a few scenes like this, you will learn to turn off. It will cease to bother you because if it didn’t, you would go crazy. And then you will wonder whether there is something wrong with you.

You will learn things that you don’t want to learn.

Full, very thoughtful article here. It doesn’t justify everything, but may cause a few to draw back and take a breath- I hope.

That said, I think we may be only months away from open warfare on our own streets.

…It’s in the blood, y’know.

via tumblr

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.