In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.
A reminder from forty years ago that Communist China was, as it still is now, dedicated to not only cultural genocide, but outright murder of countless innocents. Let us look back with William F. Buckley, Jr. at the 14th Dalai Lama looking back at a quarter century of his ascension.
Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Someone set up us the euthanasia? All your organs are belong to Canada!
First, a little mood sketch:
Carrying on…
Euthanasia has become so normalized that it has ceased to be seen as a sad but “signified” way to end suffering… and become something to boast about in Canada.
“For Wiebe, medical assistance in dying (MAID) is ‘incredibly rewarding’ work. She hasn’t faced nearly the same sort of stigma she once faced as an abortion provider and says that while she and her MAID colleagues ‘all work within the law,’ she’s also not as ‘conservative’ as some.
“What she isn’t prepared to share publicly is how often she has administered a fatal substance upon a patient’s request.
“‘I know the exact number,’ the Vancouver doctor said, ‘but I don’t want to do that, no. It’s become a weird thing, people talking about their numbers, or criticizing people who talk about their numbers.’
“‘Hundreds is good,’ she said. About 430 as of May 2022 alone, as she then testified before a special parliamentary committee on medical assistance in dying, or MAID.”
Whether its a hard Leftist who wants to double down on immanentizing the eschaton, or someone one the post-conservative Right who feels like the country has suddenly gone mad and thinks that no one is trying to bring back normalcy, people on both sides are becoming frustrated and increasingly likely to lash out. Plenty of folks in the middle and myriad moderate voters are also frustrated, but they don’t have the luxury of doing anything except getting by and dealing with more immediate issues in real life. But those proverbial idle hands seem awfully accepting of calls to violence. Case in point:
This shouldn’t be dismissed as mere rhetorical hyperbole. From Black Lives Matter, to “Black Block” anarchists and campus anti-Semites, violence and storming buildings to take control is nothing new. Sadly, the Right demonstrated that they are more than a match to the Left when it comes to violence and force three and a half years ago.
It is not some full scale People’s Revolution or some second Revolutionary War that is a concern, but frustrated fringe individuals who live in political echo chambers who are likely to do something stupid, with or even without prodding from others.
News of the Week for July 7th, 2024
Action of Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America
WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great- Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.
The sign you shouldn’t make me tap.
Of all the elections for decades that your humble author has experienced, this one feels different. Perhaps we’re on the verge of some epochal political realignment, or perhaps the irrational has just drowned out the sensible. Either which way, there has been no clear evidence in prior actual election results, so what will happen is not as clear as many are making out out to be. Many will be right not because the reasoning behind their predictions was right, but despite said reasoning—much like continental drift.
However, there are at least a few things that are likely to be true after election day:
But beyond that, making predictions based on past results is iffy at best. Is an orgy of black swans event upon us—one so great that it is making 2016 seem a continuation of normal when it comes to Presidential elections? Or is this just a combination of the irrational exuberance (or dismay) from an echo chamber divorced from a silent majority? One thing, though, seems certain: Something is different this year.
Perhaps one of the almost unsettling differences is that it seems that for most people, the election is a non-event. Most people just aren’t talking about it Oh, this isn’t just low information voters and “normies” not being engaged until Summer if over, but an almost complete lack of any outward acknowledgement that a contentious major election is upon us. It seems that to the terminally online and professional pundit class, the election is in hyperdrive and everyone is bursting with political energy. There is an increased energy overall in this election, but it is coming from an exponentially increased fervor from a logarithmically decreasing number of voices, leaving more and more people sick and tired before the election season even began! How much of polling is being affected by these voters refusing to engage at all, including with pollsters, to a degree far greater than in past elections to a degree that makes this election seem “off” as a result?
Perhaps all that most are seeing politically are the ardent few shadow puppeteers in Plato’s cave, and not the great many disengaged from any such shenanigans.
News of the Week for June 30th, 2024
In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.
It is the current fancy of some to blame America First and accuse America of being warmongers while self-declared enemies thereof are automatically considered as acting in self-defense, even when those enemies explicitly say otherwise. This is nothing new, as we see from forty years ago when William F. Buckley, Jr.’s discussion with Malcolm Muggeridge.
Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: The new pagan religious preached by our new secular priesthood.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
Becoming a physician once required skill and intelligence. Now it requires absolute devotion to Gaia.
“In a mandatory course on ‘structural racism’ for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of ‘Free, Free Palestine’ and demanded that they bow down to ‘mama earth,’ according to students in the class and audio obtained by the
“Lisa ‘Tiny’ Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as ‘justice,’ began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a ‘non-secular prayer’ to ‘the ancestors,’ instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—‘mama earth,’ as she described it—with their fists.
“At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about ‘Housing (In)Justice,’ proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving ‘what the settlers call L.A.,’ according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s ‘herstory.’
“The prayer also included a benediction for ‘black,’ ‘brown,’ and ‘houseless people’ who die because of the ‘crapatalist lie’ of ‘private property.’
“‘Mama earth,’ Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, ‘was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played.’”
The winner of the Presidential Election this coming November will determine which party holds the Presidency during the 250th Anniversary of America’s independence from Britain. Back in the 1970s was a time of high inflation and when social mores were collapsing with perversity and decay (both real and imagined) with a perceived radicalization of the political parties combined with weakness being felt in international affairs—conditions that many would say America faces now. Yet in 1976, during a contentious Presidential race run in the shadow of malfeasance from the White House and military defeat abroad where crime was skyrocketing and inflation ran rampant, America was able to come together to celebrate the Bicentennial and the “Spirit of ‘76”.
In two years time, when we celebrate another milestone birthday for America, could we ever hope to have such widespread unity and outpouring of patriotism and unity—or are we doomed to an America divided in twain with each side being treated as “the other” by the opposite side, with each side claiming itself to be the real America defending itself from “the other”.
There has long been forces and ideologies, of foreign import, trying to fundamentally transform America. Though they vary, these belief systems are at the very least intellectual “kissin’ cousins”. Those who push to supplant if not outright replace that American essence that has made America so exceptional in world history are indeed a minority, but that does not mean that those who oppose that minority are only targeting that minority.
In many ways, that transformational minority had far less opposition, if any, fifty if not much more than they do today. It may seem that things are worse off only because the ablative armor of our social mores and societal standards hadn’t bee worn away yet. Instead of seeing an establishment of a coherent opposition and the slowing down, if not outright reversal, of the broader strokes of the minority radical Left and the fundamentals of society, they see what that thin remnant of ablative social armor was up against and lash out against what to them is a sudden threat to their sense of superficial normalcy.
Much of American society has changed in the past fifty or even hundred years, just as it has before and will do so in the future. It has changed because of that transformational influence both negatively as well as positively and people responded to this fundamental transformation and fought to conserve those core values of America.
American have always had their differences of opinion and belief, even within a unifying Patriotism and love of America. This day and age is no different. But increasingly on the Right, there is less of a feeling towards emphasizing how the radical Left is wrong and then try to win over many moderate median voters or even those left-of-center who are not radical hard-Left ideologs, and more of an easier and lucrative path of emphasizing a superficial normalcy as the “true” or “real” America by exacerbating sub-cultural differences with other Americans to manichean levels of madness.. The consequence o this is to define the enemy not as the radical Left ideologue minority, but anyone who is outside an increasingly narrower definition of “normal”.
This over-simplified view can often bee result in valid criticisms from anyone considered more of an outsider as an attack from one of them against one an us, with a blind and almost histrionic defense of what is being criticized. The examples for this are manifest.
E-mail me!
