Category: Painful Truths

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via Insty:

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

Lee Harris-  Civilization And Its Enemies.

Never forgive. Never forget.

G. K. Chesterton was a great man, who was not particularly renowned in his own era but as time has marched on he has made more and more sense:

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

Yeah, I used to believe in them too. And I still am a Liberal in the classical sense of the word, but I have nothing in common with the leftard radicals who style themselves liberals progressives today. Nothing.

You could do a lot worse than going back and reading the man’s writings. Google is your friend 🙂

Sometimes the punishment fits the crime. From The Truth About Guns:

Man rapes woman in Turkey. Man continues to harass her afterwards. Woman fights back.

“She took a gun and shot him ten times, several times in his private parts, before cutting off his head and hurling it into the village square…. When police arrested her near to the severed head she said; ‘That is the head of one who toyed with my honour.’”

Looks like Allah made Turks, but Zigana made them equal.

Plus the chance for recidivism is exactly zero. You go, grrl!

The perfect metaphor for a failed Lightbringer Presidency

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Yeah, these guys seem like they’re right on top of things…

Rules to remember this election season:

Dave's voting guide: 1. Identify America's most inept, corrupt, insolvent state & local govts. 2. Identify the party in charge.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 6, 2012

Michael Clarke Duncan has died. Sorry to see him go, I loved him in Armageddon, Sin City, and The Green Mile.

I guess technically it’s the second R.I.P. for John Coffey.

UPDATE:

Apropos of nothing at all, here is a statement by Shouting Thomas, a regular commenter at Althouse. I focused on this, not because of any relation to the post he commented on, but it struck me that ST had a particularly wise wife-

My late wife, Myrna, hailed from a culture that never seems to entirely be at peace, the Philippines.

Her take on war reminded me of the environmental outlook on brushfires in the wilderness.

Myrna viewed blood lust as an innate, essential part of the human condition. Efforts to completely suppress that blood lust are doomed to failure, and ultimately produce a far worse result.

If you accept that brushfires are a part of nature’s scheme in the wilderness, the mammoth conflagration occurs less frequently. If you try to eradicate the brushfires completely, you only increase the severity and frequency of the mammoth conflagrations.

Violence and war have a purpose, else they wouldn’t exist. If you suppress your sanctimonious response for a moment and think about this, you’ll see that this is a Buddhist outlook.

I found that I have been in essential agreement with this for longer than maybe I realized. Though I am essentially a right-wing libertarian (small-l) with a large dash of social liberalism (seasoned by experience I hope) I’ve never had a problem with sublimating violence so that the real beast isn’t released. A lot of my fellow-travelers have railed against things like hyper-violent first-person-shooter games – I well remember the huge controversy about Postal when it was released- but I always felt it was better to release these impulses with fake blood in a fantasy world than to act them out for real. Hence football, hockey, and the Call of Duty franchise. Am I wrong?

15,000 barrels worth of maple syrup have gone missing from a Saint-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse in Ontario. This wouldn’t be such a chuckle except that this is a really small town- some 900 souls- and a really really huge amount of maple syrup. From Bloomberg:

The puzzle is how the culprits managed to siphon off almost C$30 million ($30.4 million) of syrup. That’s the equivalent of 10 million pounds or roughly 15,000 barrels of syrup. And the stock didn’t vanish somewhere in the supply chain of a major city. It’s missing from a warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, a tiny town of 903 people, according to the 2011 Census. They’re usually more focused on cranberries, whether it’s harvesting them or celebrating them in cranberry festivals.

So imagine the surprise when a “routine inventory check,” as the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ) calls it, revealed evidence of a massive heist. Row after row of barrels were empty, filled with nothing but sweet-smelling Quebec air.

Now it’s the federation that has some explaining to do. These are the protectors of the sap, the maple barons who have an OPEC-like sway in syrup circles and represent some 13,500 producers. Along with handling bulk syrup sales and marketing, the federation is responsible for what it calls the “global strategic maple syrup reserves.” Much like oil reserves, those backup supplies are supposed to protect against the vagaries of bad weather and volatile prices. Last week, everyone thought Quebec was heading into the winter with 37 million pounds in reserve. More than a quarter of that is now gone.

Catch that? The “Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserves” have been most scandalously debauched, nay, ravaged in a most uncivilised manner! Heads must roll! Seriously, though- that is one sticky mess of syrup. If your waffles feel unwanted- if your flapjacks are naked- you know who to blame…

Blame Canada!

To which there is but one answer:

Ace is doing handstands and backflips over at AOSHQ-

I know I’ll catch hell for this, but the election is over. This week Romney/Ryan will move ahead in the polls and they will not relinquish that lead, save for the occasional outlier. Polls will tighten and widen; but from this moment forward, the preference cascade begins.

In a way, Ryan shouldn’t be over-praised because he had so damn much material to work with. But he worked with that abundance of riches masterfully. Watch him gracefully segue from the stimulus to ObamaCare, and from ObamaCare to Medicare. He’s talking about discreet economic policies, but he knits them together so you barely even realize he’s shifted topics.

His poise was enormous. He delivered a Mortal Kombat fatality on the Obama presidency and he did it with “aw, shucks, ma’am” earnestness and goodwill. He seemed like such a nice boy as he spoke, and each and every word he said wasdeadly.

It doesn’t matter what Romney says tomorrow. I suppose we should all hope, of course, for the Speech of His Life. Perhaps he’ll deliver; one thing about Romney is that he is intensely competitive.

But unless he says something remarkably stupid — something I’m pretty sure he won’t — the media coverage on him will be “safe and solid as usual, but nothing like the power of Paul Ryan’s address.”

Which is just fine, because Ryan eviscerated the Obama Presidency tonight. Romney doesn’t need to do bonus damage to it. It’s done.

Yikes!

I think the election is over. I think it is so over we need a new Latin tense to describe how over it is, the Past Pluperfect Noncontinuing Historical Past Tense.

So, what the hell are we going to do for two months?

That’s where Romney and Ryan are going to have to step the hell up. To make this entertaining, and not just a snoozer of a blowout, they’re going to have todeliberately make some bad choices. They’re going to have to fight to keep this close, to keep it interesting.

They’re going to have to schedule some gaffes.

Man, I hope he’s right- I’ve been down so long politically I feel like the subject of a blues song.

Ace does have some suggestions as to how to, er, spice up the next few weeks…

* Paul Ryan should arrange for himself to be photographed leaving an American Legion bathroom, with the American flag stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

* Whenever Ann and Mitt Romney appear in joint interviews, Ann should flinch at Mitt’s slightest movement, and then whisper frantically to the interviewer: “Sometimes he gets so very angry with me.”

* Paul Ryan should make frequent, cryptic references to “my side-piece in Madison.”

* Mitt Romney should start saying things like “Joe Biden makes me so angry I want to punch him right in the wife.”

* Whenever Paul Ryan doesn’t like the premise of a reporter’s question, he should sharply say “Zionist lies!!!,” with sibilants a-crackin’.

Snorfle. Gawd I hope it’s really happening. Oh yeah, and this-

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