Equal opportunity launchers of mass nuclear death

Doug H. writes:

Take a look at this picture of an ICBM launch crew at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana. Not a single man is in the picture. It seems to be a perfect representation of what the liberal agenda seeks: the elimination of the white man.

The leftist climate orthodoxy continues to crumble

A major figure in the German green movement and member of the Social Democratic Party has co-authored a book expressing skepticism about manmade global warming. The book has received prominent coverage from Germany’s leading magazine Der Spiegel and from its leading daily paper Bild—”THE CO2 LIES … pure fear-mongering … should we blindly trust the experts?”—setting off a firestorm of controversy. P. Gosselin, who writes about climate news from Germany in English, calls it a massive body blow to the warming orthodoxy.

Horse race-obsessed political journalists who can’t be bothered doing their job

I’ve now read three articles—in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal—on Rick Santorum’s victories last night in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado. After touting the epochal significance of Santorum’s defeating the frontrunner Romney in three states on the same day, each of the articles informs us that no delegates to the GOP convention were selected in any of these three contests—Hmm, what’s that again? Furthermore, none of the articles bothers to tell us how this can be. For example, the WSJ says: “Minnesota and Colorado held nonbinding caucuses. The Missouri primary had no delegates at stake.” Excuse me, but the purpose of caucuses and primaries is to elect delegates. How can there be a primary election in which no delegates are elected? The WSJ doesn’t bother telling us. Instead, all its focus is on the dramatic significance of the votes.

Similarly, the popular Toby Harnden, formerly the Telegraph’s U.S. correspondent and now doing the same job at the Daily Mail, after breathing heavily for numerous paragraphs about Santorum’s great triumph, informs us:

The results of the contests, however, are only symbolic because no delegates were at stake.

This statement, crying out for explanation, receives no explanation from Harnden.

However, in a subsequent story on the same webpage, he does tell us this:

There were no actual delegates at stake tonight (though the delegates chosen in Minnesota and Colorado will closely reflect tonight’s results).

But that’s it. The actual selection of delegates is too abstruse and boring a matter for Harnden, or anyone else ostensibly covering U.S. presidential politics, to bother explaining.

The real meaning of “racism”

Billboard photo from Duluth’s “It’s hard to see
racism when you’re white” campaign.

In the entry on the anti-white campaign by the government of Duluth, Patrick H. makes a powerful statement about what “racism” really means from the liberal point of view: the existence of any significant difference of outcome between blacks and whites. But what he says is more radical and profound than that. He gets to the very core of the evil that liberal whites seek to impose on non-liberal whites.

How liberalism and homosexualism have ruined the word “partner”

In response to the entry, “The tacky liberal West,” where I discussed Australian prime minister Julia Gillard and her “partner,” Tim Mathieson, Allissa writes:

The use of the word “partner” here strikes me as insidious. Muddling of language anyone?

Indeed it is insidious. Partner means, or used to mean, two people engaged together in some shared enterprise, or who are friends and are doing things together as a team. But now “partner” has become the quasi official term for two unmarried people—whether homosexual or heterosexual—who live together. MORE…

Synchronicity on steroids

Two weeks ago, on January 25, I received from two friends two e-mails in the same Send/Receive. One was marked as being received at 3:38 p.m., the other at 3:39 p.m.

The second, received at 3:39 p.m., was from a friend who wrote:

I just came upon this poem by Walt Whitman. It’s great how Whitman acknowledges the past, says America carries all the past within itself in a way.

As soon as I had read that e-mail, I looked at the other one, which had come in from Irv P. at 3:38 p.m. It concerned our plans to go out to dinner on Long Island the next evening. He recommended a restaurant called Frederick’s. I immediately went to the website of Frederick’s, the “Best Restaurant in Long Island,” and this was the first sentence at the website:

The ambiance of old world charm set in a quaint white house on Walt Whitman Road.

Now, how often do I get an e-mail referencing Walt Whitman? Let’s say, as a conservative guess, once a year, though it’s probably less often than that. So, then, what are the chances that within one minute I would receive two totally unrelated e-mails both prominently mentioning, or linking a website that prominently mentions, Walt Whitman?
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The Super Bowl Cult, cont.

A reader says that in my negative comments about the Super Bowl I sound like a liberal, and I reply.

Also see the exchange between a reader and me on whether being a spectator of sports events rather than playing in them oneself is a sign of decline.

Why libertarians so readily ally themselves with evil and enemies

In the thread on Ron Paul, Alan Levine writes:

I fully agree with your remarks on the Ron Paul / Murray Rothbard-type obsessions and these men’s fixation on alliances with “the enemies of the enemy.” It seems to me that this is a basic characteristic of the libertarians. To them, all government is nominally “the enemy,” but in fact the real enemy, or rather the only enemy they can get worked up about, is the United States along with other Western democracies (or what used to be such). They are entirely consistent in this, so they always wind up apologizing for Nazis, Communists, etc., in preference to conservatives, democratic socialists, and the rest of the political spectrum. I have observed that when libertarians deal with history (from which they are basically alienated), they get far more emotional about the American Revolution and the evils of George III than about any modern tyranny. They only sound “patriotic” about that; the rest of American history is meaningless to them.

See my reply to Mr. Levine, in which I argue that the reason libertarians are so unprincipled is that, far from being opposed to liberalism, they are super-liberals, and thus super-relativists.

White liberals’ campaign of psychic genocide against non-liberal whites

The discussion on Duluth, Minnesota’s anti-white billboards continues.

The amorality of Ron Paul and other marginal “coalition builders”

Regarding Ron Paul’s disowning of his own newsletters’ past right-wing statements about race and other subjects, a reader points out that Paul’s dishonest and unprincipled reversal follows the pattern of his mentor, Murray Rothbard, who sought to build coalitions with whatever disaffected group seemed the strongest at the time. “At the time of the ‘racist’ newsletters,” the reader writes, “Paul was building bridges to the David Duke crowd. Now he is appealing to a left-wing, OWS, anti-Iraq War crowd, so he is pro-immigrant, anti-anti-Muslim, anti-DADT, etc.”

See the whole exchange.

Bauer potpourri

While it is weeks old, Gary Bauer’s January 12th e-mail, forwarded by Clark Coleman, contains four items each of which is highly interesting. They concern: James O’Keefe secret filming of the issuance of ballots to dead people in the New Hampshire primary; David Axelrod defending Rev. Wright; Ron Paul’s liberal supporters; and the Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection of an Obama administration-backed suit against a church for firing a minister. MORE…

What blacks want to be called (the never ending saga)

Some blacks are resisting the name “African-American” and would prefer being called black. It wasn’t that way in the late 1980s, when Jesse Jackson proposed that blacks be called African-Americans, and virtually the entire mainstream society, white and black, instantly complied. Imagine having such influence. Jackson must have felt like the king of our culture when that happened.

There are positive things about the current pushback against “African-American.” The blacks who feel this way are not blaming whites for the label, and they are not saying that the name denigrates them, as they said in the past about “black,” “Negro,” and “colored.” They are just saying that they don’t relate to the African part of “African-American,” because they feel themselves to be Americans.

However, does any of this make any difference? Whether individual blacks identify as Africans, as or African-Americans, or (making the hearts of mainstream conservatives go pitter-patter) simply as Americans, the fact remains that as a community blacks are still dragging our society down, and will continue to drag it down so long as whites keep giving them power in our politics and our culture far beyond anything they have earned or are able to earn.
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Conservatives against Coulter

David Catron at The American Spectator and many of his commenters have turned against Ann Coulter over her support for Romney and Romneycare. Many think that something has happened to her. Some say she has lost her conservative principles. Others say she has lost her smarts. Others say she has lost her mind.

By the way, I also began saying several months ago that Coulter had changed. As I remember, there were two very different changes, coming one after the other, that I noticed. The first was that her edgy personality had gotten edgier than ever and that she seemed to be falling apart. The second was her new seriousness, as seen in her articles for Romney in which she makes a single sustained case without her usual jokes.

Still, I have to ask, what conservative principles has Ann Coulter ever had? Her entire career has consisted of bashing liberals. She has never articulated the conservative things she supposedly believes in that are better than the liberal things she opposes. And now that, after 15 years as a conservative writer, she is finally arguing strongly for something or someone, it is the non-conservative Romney and his Romneycare.

Also, Coulter’s attaching herself at the hip to some non-conservative Republican and taking remarkably stupid positions on his behalf is not new. Check out what I said about her all-out embrace of Bush and his Iraq policy in 2006. The title of the entry is, “Coulter takes stupid pills for her man.”

* * *

But Coulter’s critics at TAS also seem off-base. They speak of Romney as though he were the equivalent of Bob Dole or John McCain. But Dole was brain dead, which Romney obviously isn’t. And McCain was an enemy of conservatism, whose greatest passion was sticking it to conservatives. Romney may be a weak conservative or a moderate, but he is not an anti-conservative. It is fantastically ironic that people who voted for the egregious McCain in 2008 are now declaring in high tones that they will never, ever, vote for Romney.

And who do they think would be better than Romney and have a better chance of defeating Obama? Gingrich?

So there’s a lot of stupid going around. The conservatives are unstrung. They can’t think coherently, because conservatism itself is incoherent.
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WND: Iranian leadership calls for destruction of Jews and Israel via nuclear-tipped ICBMs

Reza Kahlili at WorldNetDaily reports:

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people.

The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.

Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a conservative analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine. [cont.]

Does such an article exist? Does it say the things that Kahlili attributes to it? And does the article reflect the position of the Iranian leadership, as Kahlili claims it does? As I have said numerous times before, no story posted by World Net Daily—especially a highly sensational story such as this—should be credited, unless it also appears at more responsible news sites.

Samples from the Ron Paul newsletter

A website called Spirit/Water/Blood has substantive quotations that have been scanned from Ron Paul’s old newsletter from the ‘80s and ‘90s. The style and worldview revealed in these passages does not sound like the Paul I’ve heard as a presidential candidate, and I assume the story is correct that the real author of these items was Llewelyn Rockwell.

Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s Rockwell was a paleo-libertarian, meaning that he combined paleoconservative with libertarian beliefs. Meaning, he combined adherence and loyalty to a particular culture and people with an opposition to big government. Another expression of paleo-libertarianism was the Rockwell-Rothbard Report which was published in the same period and to which I subscribed for a while. Since then, at his website lewrockwell.com, Rockwell has dropped the paleo part and become something for which there is no ready label, but could be described as a radical anti-American libertarian ideologue. The essence of this ideology is that big government is the root of all evil, and therefore any people who have a big government deserve to be destroyed. Rockwell is the libertarian equivalent of the anti-homosexual pastor Fred Phelps. At the prospect of the ruin and death of America, her culture, and her people, Rockwell and his adherents stand there with signs gleefully declaring, “God hates big government.”

In any case, as I said recently, regardless of what we think of the various controversial statements published in the Ron Paul newsletter, either Paul, as he has now avowed, paid zero attention to and had zero knowledge of what was published under his name, which means that he is a nothing; or else he is a bigger liar than Obama denying he had any knowledge of the anti-America, anti-white preachings of Rev. Wright. Either way Paul’s reputation as a man of integrity is kaput.
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America has come to a stop

As I sit here before my computer in my apartment in New York City, smoking a cigar and sipping a Jim Beam, I sense a complete silence and stillness in the world and society around me. I realize that it’s because the entire country is watching the Super Bowl, an activity in which I am not participating. The utter quietness is like that of Christmas Eve, though without, of course, the feeling of holiness. It’s more like a vast psychic deadness.

- end of initial entry -

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Even though I am an avid fan of football (particularly the college game), I also am not watching the Super Bowl. The gratuitous fawning over the athletes, the insulting awfulness of the advertisements, the outrageous “spectacle” in which all of America self-consciously glories—it all leaves me feeling stupider for having participated. I haven’t watched it in a number of years, because it is pure pagan excess. It is exactly the sort of thing that one expects of a society that is, in Chesterton’s phrase, trying to stab its nerves back to life.

So enjoy your detachment as best you may. I will be sipping a very fine bourbon of my own, listening to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. I’m sorry that I can’t be with you. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 06:40 PM

Taking football an order of magnitude too seriously

I was having breakfast in an Upper West Side eatery a little after 12 o’clock noon. Three big TV sets were playing on the wall opposite our table. On all of them, huge men, white and black but mostly black, were discussing, with tremendous energy and passion, the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl was not to start until 6 p.m.. Evidently the pre-game shows were to go on for six hours.

This Super Bowl madness is not, as some believe, a sign of the wonderful vitality of our society, but of a hypertrophy that presages its decline and disintegration.

Hypertrophied: adjective
1. (of an organ or body part) excessively enlarged as a result of increased size in the constituent cells.

For whatever good it will do, I hereby declare VFR a Super Bowl-free zone.

Duluth puts up billboards calling all white people racists

Don Ness, the mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, has had billboards erected in his city that say, “It’s hard to see racism when you’re white,” along with images of white people with words written in ink on their faces listing the “privileges” they unconsciously enjoy by virtue of being white.

Naturally there is controversy, and many local people are unhappy with the billboard, and there is the usual feckless back and forth between the supporters and opponents. See video of the news segment.

But will any of Ness’s critics go beyond the impotent gripes that white people typically express in such circumstances, and have the presence of mind to ask him the following questions?

• “Since racism is the worst thing you can accuse anyone of in our society, can you tell us what this racism—which you say that we are all ignoring and facilitating—consists of?”

• “Can you give us specific examples of this racism?”

• “Since the only way we can know that something truly is bad and can be fixed is to have an idea of the good that is the opposite of the bad, please tell us the following: (a) What can we do to rid ourselves of this racism?, and (b) What will a non-racist America look like, so that we can know when we have rid ourselves of this racism?”

• “If you are unable or unwilling to answer these questions, then you are admitting that there is NOTHING that we can do to rid ourselves of our supposed racism. Which means that you are morally condemning us for something that is out of our power. Which means that you are morally condemning us for the fact that we are white. Which means that you are an anti-white racist.”

Such questions and arguments, stated firmly and persistently so that the mayor and his supporters could not escape them by changing the subject or calling the questioners racists, would reveal the utter emptiness, falsity, and wickedness of the mayor’s indictment of his fellow whites.

Tragically, however, there are two things that we can be absolutely sure of: no one in mainstream America will ever ask these questions or anything like them; and the indictment of whites as racists will continue as long as America—in its current, liberal incarnation—continues to exist.
MORE…

What the choice between Romney and Gingrich comes down to

Conor Friedersdorf writes at The Atlantic:

Thus the genius of the Romney strategy. It was briefly the case that uninformed conservatives could feel good voting for Gingrich. After all the negative ads, they’ll not feel good about casting their ballot for anyone. And if you’re gonna vote for a pandering liar regardless, better a disciplined family man than a mercurial egomaniac.

The tacky liberal West, II

Here’s another photo of the Prime Minister of Australia and her “partner,” published in the Herald Sun this past December:

Here’s a page with many more photos of the couple.

The tacky liberal West

I can’t get enough of Julia Gillard. In researching a side-point in the previous entry about her, I came upon this photograph of Gillard and her “partner,” Tim Mathieson:

This is the way the prime minister of a Western country, with her lug of a “partner” at her side, dresses at a reception for foreign ambassadors held at her official residence. She looks as if she’s heading out to pick up a sandwich at the corner deli.
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“Hate-crimes” as the expression and proof of liberal rule

The creation of the legal category of “hate-crime” illustrates how liberalism is the dominant force of our society, progressively taking over and displacing normal and traditional concepts. Traditionally, a crime consists of two elements: the intention to commit the criminal act, and the criminal act. Those are the two things that must be found in order for a jury to find a person guilty of a crime. The only required psychological component is that the defendant had mens rea—the guilty thought, the guilty intent to commit the crime. The precise nature and quality of this intention does not matter, insofar as the establishment of his guilt is concerned, only that he had the intention to commit the crime.

The establishment of “hate-crime” as a category in criminal law adds on to the normal idea of criminal intent the idea of “hate.” If you “hate” the ethnic, religious, or sexual group to which your victim belongs, and if such hate was part of your motivation, your crime is much worse, and is punished more severely, and society condemns you more harshly. Determining whether such “hate” obtained in a given crime involves looking into the thoughts of the defendant in a manner that does not happen in normal criminal law. It defines as criminal certain kinds of thoughts, which has never been the case in the Anglo-American legal tradition. It makes certain kinds of intentions more criminal, and more punishable, than other kinds of intentions. So, even as society keeps letting off with light punishments people who have committed terrible murders, it makes a huge deal of, and punishes more severely, people who have committed crimes who also had “hate” in their mind when they committed them. In 1989 an acquaintance said that racism is now worse than murder. With the establishment of the category of hate-crimes, that statement has become literally true.

As I’ve always said, the ruling principle of modern liberal society is non-discrimination. Therefore under liberalism discrimination is the worst thing there is, the thing that must be rooted out and eliminated, as liberals are always saying it must be. The introduction of hate-crimes statutes shows how this liberal ideology has taken over our society. It shows how, to a very significant degree, America is no longer a free country, but an ideological state, ruling society according the ideology of non-discrimination. But of course this ideology is not imposed equally on everyone, but principally on white Christian heterosexual men, who according to the liberal ideology are the main or only source of hate and discrimination in our society. Thus when, as in Philadelphia this week, blacks commit what appears from the news reports to be a grossly obvious hate-crime against whites, physically assaulting a white cab driver and the white cabbie while yelling racial epithets, the hate-crime charge was instantly dismissed by Philadelphia’s district attorney.

* * *

Now consider what I’ve just said, then consider the fact that according to mainstream conservative writers, America is a “center-right” country. And their evidence for this statement is that, as found in opinion polls, a little over 20 percent of Americans describe themselves as “liberal,” while almost 40 percent describe themselves as “conservative.” It doesn’t matter that our actual ruling ideology is left-liberal. Because more people call themselves conservative, that means we are a conservative country.
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Paul Weston speaking in New York

Paul Weston, the anti-Islamization writer and head of the British Freedom Party, will be in Manhattan giving a talk about the party and its aims on Thursday evening, February 16. If you are interested in attending, and don’t have my address, write to me here and I will reply with information on the time and place.

A witty insight into female psychology

I just came upon this quotation by Robert Heinlein:

If in an argument with your wife you discover that you are in the right, apologize immediately.

I think Heinlein is on to something. But the problem is, one would have to be a saint to practice his advice.
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No hate crime charges in Philly racial assault

We could title this story, “The hate whose name no respectable white person dares speak.”

James P. writes:

Follow up story—no hate-crime charges for black teens. Probably a complete coincidence that the Philadelphia DA is black.

Here’s the article:

Teens Held in Attack on Cabbie and Passenger Won’t Face Hate-Crime Charges
By Allison Steele Inquirer Staff Writer

The teenagers arrested after an attack on a cabdriver and his 21-year-old passenger in Center City last weekend, during which racial epithets were shouted [LA replies: Ahh, the passive voice, where would modern civilization be without it?], will not be charged with committing hate crimes, the District Attorney’s Office said Thursday.

“We have to be able to prove that race was the motivator for the crime,” said Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for the District Attorney’s Office. “Just because epithets were said during the crime doesn’t mean it was the reason for the crime.” [JP: Needless to say that would not be the standard if a gang of whites screaming racist slurs beat up a black person.]

The three teenagers charged in the assault, who are black, allegedly spewed racial slurs as they reached through the window and punched passenger Brian Goldman, who is white. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:27 PM

Another image from the late West or post-West

On the evening after her famous escape last week, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard held a reception for foreign diplomats. The UK Telegraph ran this photograph:

PM Julia Gillard is joined by partner Tim Mathieson
to welcome Swedish Ambassador HE Anders

Isn’t that nice—the prime minister has a “partner.” We have the same thing in New York, where both Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo live with their respective “partners,” or at least girlfriends. But it’s worse when (1) the “partner” is the “partner,” not just of a mayor or a governor, but of the leader of a country, and (2) the “partner” is a man, excuse me, a male. What is the poor fellow’s place in the scheme of things? Look at the expression on Tim Mathieson’s face, the over-eager solicitousness with which he looks at the Swedish ambassador. What is he doing there? He himself doesn’t know.
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A Man Called D’Vontaveous

The lower half of a certain racial group may not contribute much to American civilization, but they sure are creative with their names. The Seattle Times reports:

Man, who was kicked by a cop in Seattle, guilty in gun case

The 18-year-old man who was seen on video being kicked by a Seattle police officer after an alleged robbery in 2010 was found guilty Thursday of unlawful possession of a firearm in an unrelated case.

D’Vontaveous Hoston faces 15 to 27 months in prison when he is sentenced on March 2.

The conviction stems from an incident July 22 when King County sheriff’s deputies saw a group of nearly a dozen males gathered near Third Avenue and Pike Street in Seattle. Deputies noted that two males were fighting in the center of the group, according to charging documents.

The fight quickly broke up, but witnesses told deputies that one of the participants appeared to have a gun.

Deputies said they found Hoston nearby and he matched the description provided by witnesses. Deputies found a loaded pistol in Hoston’s waistband, charging documents said.

According to the charges, Hoston told officers he carried a gun to protect himself from police.…

Tech problems

The site has been inactive all day because I have been without an Internet connection—no e-mail, no browsing, no nothing. The internet service provider is unable to fix it so far. It will not be fixed until tomorrow, or even Monday.

Another white woman who doesn’t read VFR is murdered by her black boyfriend

When I began reading the below article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, I hadn’t noticed the small captionless photo of a man at the top of the article and was not sure if the race of the suspect was known. Then, as the article unfolded, telling me, bit by intensifying bit, in a kind of liberal self-parody, more and more about the obviously dangerous nature of the man whom the good-hearted hippie-like divorced 44-year-old mother-of-two Sarajane Hakopian had welcomed into her life, I figured he sounded like a black man, except that his name, Brian Mallory, didn’t sound at all black. So, believe it or not, I wasn’t sure that he was black, even though the reader who had sent me the article had said he was black (it’s easy to be wrong about these things, and I try, most of the time, not to jump prematurely to conclusions).

The first remarkable thing about the piece is the title:

Was caring nature a factor in Sarajane Hakopian’s death?

Of course that is a theme I am forever sounding, about Eloi women who give their caring, loving, incorrigibly naive and needy selves to rough and uncaring men of different race, usually black, sometimes Hispanic or Muslim, who then kill them. I describe such relationships and such murders as both the ultimate concrete result and the ultimate symbol of liberalism. But I don’t remember a mainstream news story about such a murder ever sounding that un-PC note of realism before.

The article starts out in idyllic tones about how Sarajane Hakopian was the “kindest soul” in Montpelier, Virginia, “the heart of what Montpelier is all about,” as one friend called her. “You always saw her with her tea, inseparable. She was a friend to everyone she met.”

Then the article says that Hakopian was found dead Monday afternoon, and that Brian Mallory is the suspect.

Then we learn that Mallory is a convicted felon, who started mowing Hakopian’s lawn and became her lover, partner, hook-up, or whatever word we’re supposed to use.

Then we learn that Hakopian had two children living with her from an ended marriage. (How many murdered white women have left their husbands, cutting themselves off from a responsible, protective male presence in their life, and are living with men not their husbands?)

Then we learn that there also lived at the house “a parade of young people whose families wanted their offspring to share in Hakopian’s nurturing but strict ways.”

Then we learn that Mallory was convicted of a “brutal armed robbery” 20 years ago, and that he is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 325 pounds.

Then we learn that notwithstanding the warnings from friends about being involved with such a man, Hakopian “saw no boundaries associated with color, religion, political beliefs or social standing”—the only reference to race in the article. I should add that warnings from friends are almost unheard of in these stories of white women killed by their black boyfriends. In almost every such article I’ve seen, everyone around the woman, including her useless brain-dead Eloi parents if they are in the picture, seems completely approving and accepting of the relationship, and no one takes her aside and tells her that she might be putting herself at risk—because, of course, that would be discriminatory and racist, and, perhaps an even more compelling reason for remaining silent, to warn your friend or sister or daughter away from a relationship with a black criminal thug and thus harm the erotic diversity of our society would be a greater tragedy than preventing her murder. In any case, when I read that line about how Sarajane saw no boundaries associated with color I finally concluded, slow reader that I am, that Mallory had to be black.

Then the article said that in February 1991 Mallory “was sentenced to 90 years in prison for robbery, kidnapping and firearms convictions with 56 years suspended.”

It was only then that I noticed the tiny uncaptioned photo of a black man at the top of the article and realized this was Mallory. Here is a larger version of the same photo, along with one of Hakopian:

Sarajane Hakopian and Brian Mallory

Here is the article: MORE…

Paul Weston speaking in New York

Paul Weston, the anti-Islamization writer and head of the British Freedom Party, will be in Manhattan giving a talk about the party and its aims on Thursday evening, February 16. If you are interested in attending, and if you don’t have my address, write to me here and I will reply with information on the time and place.

Why a “secular sphere” and the “promotion of secular values” are different—and mutually opposed—things

In March 2006 a European reader (Mr. Particular Swede, later Conservative Swede) dissented from my strong critique of the European secular anti-Islamization manifesto and its promotion of “secular values.” He felt that I was delineating a war between Christianity and secular values, whereas, he said, many secular values are in keeping with Christianity and indeed strengthen Christianity. In response I argued that the general idea of the “secular” or of a secular sphere on one side and the activist promotion of “secular values” on the other have distinct meanings:

When Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” he was providing for the authority of a secular sphere as distinct from the authority of the religious sphere. And this was one of the most important things he ever said.

However, this secular sphere does not exclude God. It merely operates independently of direct religious authority.

But when modern people promote “secular values” per se, they are specifically promoting things in the light of their not being religious and of having nothing to do with God or any transcendent reality.

To illustrate the difference between doing secular things and promoting secular values as secular values, when the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 drafted the U.S. Constitution, they were creating an instrument of secular government. But they didn’t say, “We’re promoting secular values.” They said, “We’re creating an instrument of government.”

When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, he didn’t say, “I’m promoting secular values,” he said, “I’m inventing dynamite.”

To do a secular thing, like creating an instrument of government or inventing dynamite, does not exclude God. But to promote the spread of secular values as secular values is to attempt to create a world order that excludes God and any transcendent truth. Which of course is what the entire modernist and post-modernist project is about.

Why would the manifesto signers promote “secular values for all,” unless they specifically were seeking to exclude God and religion as such? To advance their ostensible purpose, the protection of liberty from Islamic tyranny, all they had to say was that they were in favor of individual freedom, tolerance, rule of law, etc. By pushing the notion of “secular values” into the center of their statement they make it clear that they are asking for more than individual freedom, tolerance, rule of law etc. They are seeking the creation of a social order that excludes God.

American writer refuses to visit Turkey, comes under extraordinary attack by Turkey’s prime minister

The postmodern novelist Paul Auster (my cousin) is in the news:

Turkey’s PM takes aim at writer Paul Auster over Israel
ISTANBUL | Wed Feb 1, 2012 10:57am EST

(Reuters)—Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan branded acclaimed novelist Paul Auster as ignorant on Tuesday for refusing to visit Turkey in protest at the jailing of journalists, accusing the Jewish American writer of double-standards for visiting Israel.

Though a foreign novelist made an easy target, there is rising unease over press freedom under Erdogan among Turkish liberals, many of whom had supported his mission to strengthen democracy and tame Turkey’s coup-making generals. [LA replies: How’s that for an Orwellian statement from Reuters—”his mission to strengthen democracy and tame Turkey’s coup-making generals”? Of course the Turkish military has been since the time of Kemal Ataturk the principal guarantor of the non-Islamic regime that Ataturk founded, along with its freedoms—namely its freedoms from Islamic law. Further, Erdogan’s increasing suppression of the military has meant the effective end of the Kemalist regime and the return of Islamic rule. But lying, leftist Reuters tells its readers that Erdogan, by taming the generals, was seeking to strengthen democracy—the exact opposite of the truth.]

Some 100 members of the news media are in jail in Turkey, one of the highest numbers worldwide. The government insists they are not being prosecuted because of what they wrote.

“If you come so what? If you don’t come, so what? Will Turkey lose prestige?,” Erdogan said in a mocking voice to applause from provincial leaders of his ruling AK Party at a meeting in the capital Ankara. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:24 PM

Pro-”self-deportation” Romney wins Florida Hispanic vote by 2-1 margin

Roy Beck of NumbersUSA sends out this e-mail:

NEWS FLASH—Offered a stark choice on the illegal immigration issue, Florida Latino Republicans today broke nearly 2-1 for the candidate with the firmest opposition to amnesty and the strongest support for enforcement.

Mitt Romney’s margin of victory among Latinos was nearly double his margin of victory among Whites.

For those of you who supported other candidates, you have to at least feel some real satisfaction that on the issue of immigration, Mitt Romney the winner was painted as by-far the strongest opponent of amnesty. You may have preferred another candidate—including the President—for other reasons, but most Florida voters went to the polls with the idea that Romney was indeed the toughest on immigration. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:13 PM

The GOP’s ineluctable Romney problem

Ok, Romney is a huge winner in Florida. Ok, Romney showed himself tough and ruthless against Gingrich—showed that he has the stuff to bring the fight to Obama in the general. And yes, Romney is better on illegal immigration than Gingrich. Does any of this mean that the GOP’s Romney dilemma has been resolved? Not at all. Obamacare remains the biggest issue in this election, and, as Andrew McCarthy argued at NRO earlier in the month, Romney is simply not situated to campaign forcefully and believably against it, because, though he has shamelessly flip-flopped on every other issue in his political career, he stalwartly defends his own version of Obamacare in Massachusetts.

McCarthy writes:

Of course he now says he’d fight to repeal Obamacare, but is Romney really the best candidate to be making that fight? How convincing will he be in decrying wealth redistribution, runaway government spending, and freedom-killing government mandates while he continues championing an overbearing state program that stands as a monument to all those things?

Indicting Romney for supporting a policy that the entire American political system supports

A reader attacks Romney very harshly over his support for legal immigration, and I reply that the problem is not Romney, the problem is all of us, the problem is America.

Further angles on “social justice”

The stimulating discussion of “social justice,” started yesterday, is still going strong.

Even when the liberal media tell the racial truth, they twist it in a liberal direction

See Jake F.’s shrewd point about how a Philadelphia newspaper, while reporting a black-on-white assault, did it in such a way as first to trigger the stereotype of “racist whites” in the readers’ minds.

Malkin, resoundingly, for Santorum

Michelle Malkin has an exceptionally forceful column posted Monday in which she supports Rick Santorum for the GOP nomination, dismisses Romney, and eviscerates Gingrich. She admits Santorum’s defects (e.g. his record in the Senate as a “big government Republican”), but argues that overall he is a man of principle who has repeatedly and consistently opposed leftist initiatives when both the R man and the G man were embracing them.

Here are the first few paragraphs:

Rick Santorum opposed TARP.

He didn’t cave when Chicken Littles in Washington invoked a manufactured crisis in 2008. He didn’t follow the pro-bailout GOP crowd—including Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—and he didn’t have to obfuscate or rationalize his position then or now, like Rick Perry and Herman Cain did. He also opposed the auto bailout, Freddie and Fannie bailout, and porkulus bills.

Santorum opposed individual health care mandates—clearly and forcefully -as far back as his 1994 U.S. Senate run. He has launched the most cogent, forceful fusillade against both Romney and Gingrich for their muddied, pro-individual health care mandate waters.

He voted against cap and trade in 2003, voted yes to drilling in ANWR, and unlike Romney and Gingrich, Santorum has never dabbled with eco-radicals like John Holdren, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. He hasn’t written any “Contracts with the Earth.”

Santorum is strong on border security, national security, and defense. Mitt the Flip-Flopper and Open Borders-Pandering Newt have been far less trustworthy on immigration enforcement. [LA replies: be sure to check out Santorum’s statements on immigration matters that Malkin links to. He has been stronger and more articulate on the issue than I had given him credit for.]

Santorum is an eloquent spokesperson for the culture of life. He has been savaged and ridiculed by leftist elites for upholding traditional family values -not just in word, but in deed. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:51 AM

Against Romney

Here’s a powerful (and very long) anti-Romney piece, by John Hawkins at TownHall. Two excerpts:

Mitt Romney is a repeat of the same show conservatives have seen over and over again and we all know the ending if the candidate gets elected. These plastic men, these political Stretch Armstrongs get inside the Beltway Bubble, the media starts working on them, the establishment starts whispering in their ear and next thing you know, they’re explaining how important comprehensive immigration reform is to the conservative cause or why we need another Bridge to Nowhere.

When you’re a grassroots conservative who has been mocked, ridiculed and attacked for believing in conservatism, capitalism, and the Constitution, sold out again and again by people in your own party, and told your nation is on the verge of a debt-driven crisis that could bankrupt us, the last thing you want is to be treated like you’re stupid by a phony Massachusetts moderate who tells you he believes the same things you do when you damn well know he doesn’t mean a word of it.

* * *

Never have so many self-interested, politically-gutless establishment space fillers gathered in one place as on the endorsement list for Mitt Romney. If Bob Dole, John McCain, Susan Molinari, Lisa Murkowski, Jim Talent, Joe Scarborough, Mel Martinez, Jim Gerlach, Judd Gregg, Jon Huntsman, John Sununu and Norm Coleman are all lining up behind a candidate in a contested GOP primary, it’s an almost ironclad guarantee that candidate is not going to be worth a bucket of warm spit once he gets into office. If you want to know why you’re seeing so many Tea Partiers lining up behind Newt Gingrich, who despite his flaws has done more for the conservative cause than any other living politician, it’s because they see the politicians backing Mitt Romney and they’re well aware that they’re not friends of grassroots conservatives.

Ganging up on Gingrich?

The several items I’ve just posted on the GOP contest are overwhelmingly against Gingrich. That was not my intention, as I’ve been trying to maintain a reasonable balance between the different views. It just happened that the e-mails that came in over the last day, and the articles I came across online, have been overwhelmingly anti-Newt.

An insightful analysis of R. and G.

Jim writes:

Re your discussion, “The ‘conservative’ versus the liar,” I’d rather have the liar than the “conservative.”

Romney is an ambitious man of the establishment of basically conservative mien, but no great conservative passion. This is less than optimal, but not completely unacceptable. Romney was comfortable with American society as it existed in say 1960, and lives his personal life in accord with that. He is not “hostile” to it. And as a technocrat, he is actually educable. We’ve seen that already on the idea of “self-deportation.” Someone has explained it to him in the course of the campaign, and he is intelligent enough, and understands supply and demand well enough, to understand it and has now embraced it (while Gingrich mocks it as impossible). Romney will not charge forward as I’d like, but if the issues arise, conservatives make their case, the Republicans in Congress are willing to move, he can be a positive force. For instance, it’s possible to see Romney actually coming to an understanding of what mass low-skill immigration is doing to the labor market for working class men, and how that affects their ability to be bread winners and have the sort of family life Mormons approve of and Romney signing onto serious immigration enforcement and restriction. It’s at least possible, because Romney is educable.

Gingrich is not educable, especially on any of the important issues related to the “National Question.” MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:41 AM

A reader says no to Gingrich

Sophia A. writes (January 29):

There are a lot of reasons to dislike both Gingrich and Romney, but the fact that Newt’s major patron is the odious Sheldon Adelson is one of them. The major media have gone on the scent, just recently, with an article in Time magazine and today a front page expose in the NY Times. This knowledge appears to have erupted suddenly. I predict outrage will follow. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:38 AM

Why do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

I’m not an admirer of former Bush official and hopeful future anybody official Peter Wehner at Commentary, but his short article, “The Real Reasons Conservatives Oppose Gingrich,” in which he refutes the idea that the “Establishment” opposes Gingrich because it “fears genuine change,” seems correct. The fact is, they have many valid reasons for opposing him that have nothing to do with “fearing genuine change..

Jennifer Rubin, bully

May one be allowed to observe that the Washington Post neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin does not have much sense of fairness? She writes:

When you are losing a critical state by double digits, your negative ratings are sky high and both the media and your opponents are shredding you on both character and policy grounds, you might get testy. And if you are Newt Gingrich, whose never been known to take criticism gracefully, you might appear unhinged and frantic. Gingrich’s rant that his poor showing in Florida is all the doing of the “establishment” has become comical. It’s the equivalent of the Howard Dean “scream”—a perfect metaphor for an angry and unsettled candidate who knows he’s losing it.

In reality, of course, the Republican establishment has been ganging up on Gingrich and trying to destroy him, in an all-out political assault the likes of which we have not seen before in GOP presidential politics. They may have good reasons for doing so; that’s not the point. The point is that Rubin savages Gingrich, not just politically, but as a person, portraying him as psychologically flawed and “losing it,” i.e., losing his mind and his self-control, merely for his pointing to the fact of this assault and saying that it is damaging him. And Rubin is nothing is not industrious. At her Washington Post blog, she has already posted about five full length blog entries this morning dismantling Gingrich.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:25 AM

The problem of a leader who is all ideas and no steadiness

Alexis Zarkov writes:

I think Mr. Auster’s description of Gingrich as “erratic” and “unstable” is accurate. I recognize the type—he’s a “idea man,” who has little interest in execution. The famous physicist Edward Teller had just such a personality. While a brilliant physicist in his early career, he did not like to follow through and rarely finished anything he started. While working on at the Manhattan Project, he usually failed to complete his assignments, and would drift off to dream about “The Super” (an early, but unworkable, idea for a fusion weapon). In his later career, he was a fount of new ideas, some of them very good, but he left the details to other people. People of this personality type should never hold an executive position because they are too unstable, and lack focus. Gingrich as president would produce a chaotic administration.

On the other hand, Romney strikes me as the opposite of a Gingrich. He’s able to prioritize tasks, and focus on what needs to be done. That’s one reason he has been successful in business. Unfortunately this personality type can make for an uninspiring leader. We don’t have good choices for 2112: Obama, Gingrich, and Romney. Unless a brokered Republican convention delivers someone else, we have to go for Romney as the least bad choice.

Error as part of the path to truth

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
— John Milton, Areopagitica: A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, 1644

Racial assault in Philadelphia

From the Philadelphia Daily News comes the story of three teenagers attacking a passenger in a taxi cab and then the driver, apparently for no reason other than race. While the paper, in a rare gesture, informs us that the assailants were black and the victims white, it doesn’t provide this information until almost the end of the article, even though the very first sentence of the story states that the attackers used racial slurs on the victims. As a result, over the course of six paragraphs and 217 words, the reader knows that it was a racial attack, but he has not been told which race was attacking which. Since the Daily News was so reluctant to be forthcoming on that point, why did it mention race at all? Because, as just mentioned, the attackers themselves used racial slurs—which generally is not the case with the endless series of black-on-white assaults in this country (do you think that black thugs are not hip to hate-crime laws?). Therefore this mainstream media organ, even under the pro-black, anti-white rules of liberal journalism, had no choice but to specify the race of the assailants and the victims, which the mainstream media ordinarily do not do; but, reflecting its pro-black imperative, it didn’t do so until two thirds of the way through the article.

Thugs attack cabbie, passenger

IN A HORRIFIC assault in Center City on Saturday night, three teenagers who were spouting racial slurs pulled a man out of a cab to beat him. And when the cabdriver intervened to stop the assault, the teens turned their rage on him, police said yesterday.

About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.

The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:28 PM

Social justice

Why do people on the left demand “social justice,” and not simply “justice”?

Because the things they want are not just. Therefore they add the word “social” onto “justice,” creating a new concept that bears no relationship to justice, but employs the word “justice” and elicits—from the leftists and their various clients and dupes—the same emotional and moral response as the word “justice.”

Justice, while often difficult to apply in particular situations, at its core has a simple meaning: what is due. It means that people receive what is due to them. Since leftists demand, not justice, but “social justice,” this tells us that the things that are demanded on behalf of the various leftist clients, minorities, and victim groups are not due to them. The left is thus forever calling for and requiring things that are not just. The proof of this is seen in the fact that if these desired things were just, the left would simply ask for justice. But it doesn’t ask for justice, it asks for social justice, proving that its aims are not just.
MORE…

Still nowhere on Islam

Here is another illustration of why I now believe that America will not turn around before it’s too late.

Several weeks ago an acquaintance told me how the subject of Islam had come up among some colleagues of hers. In the course of the conversation, these people—intelligent conservatives working in a conservative organization—said that Islam is one of the Abrahamic faiths and therefore compatible with our society, that Islam is a tolerant religion, that Islam was an advanced civilization when Europe was backward—all the pro-Islam clichés.

When I heard this, my heart sank. If, after ten years of incessant debate and discussion in conservative publications about Islam, intelligent conservatives have no idea what Islam is but mindlessly repeat the slogans about how it’s a tolerant and culturally advanced religion, if they know nothing more about the subject than what they’ve heard from the Islam apologists, what does that say about our ability as a society to grasp the nature of the Islamization threat and defend ourselves from it?

In this connection, consider Robert Spencer. This industrious man has been incessantly publishing books, blogging, and speaking on the subject of Islam for many years. He is deeply informed on Islam and authoritatively devastating on the side of Islam that of most interest to us, the treatment Islamic law requires of non-Muslims. As an author of books, he is genial, witty, a good writer, and not any kind of fanatic. We are fortunate to have him. (I say nothing here about Spencer’s negative side, which is not relevant to the discussion.) Also, he is not obscure, but is reasonably well known, certainly in conservative circles. Yet the academics and conservatives of whom I speak—again, very intelligent people—seem never to have heard of him, never to have read him or other Islam critics or taken in anything they have to say.

If Spencer’s labors—combined with every day’s news stories which mightily back up his analysis of Islam, not to mention 1,390 years of well-documented Islamic history—have achieved so little, if so many people are not even aware of the deadly and threatening nature of Islam but look on the religion approvingly and welcomingly, or at least complacently, what then will wake them up, other than actually coming under Islam’s power and seeing the truth for themselves? And then it will be too late.
MORE…

More on Gingrich’s support for Puerto Rican statehood

And, is it true that Puerto Rico is more white than the mainland U.S.?

Diversity and fear

I’ve done some polishing and revising on the entry, “Diversity and the reign of fear,” which was posted Sunday morning. It might be worth a second read.

Beck, blacks, and Progressives

JC in Houston writes (January 27):

Glenn (“Blacks won the American Revolution”) Beck was in rare form this morning. He is unfortunately on the Sirius Patriot Channel while I’m driving to work. It started off with some black activist talking about how MLK was for socialist redistribution and Beck then defending his hero MLK and saying how he wanted just a colorblind society. Beck then went on to criticize the new Lucas film Redtails, another telling of the Tuskeegee airmen of WWII. Beck’s criticism was that the movie had bad acting that didn’t do justice to “one of the most heroic episodes in American history.” And of course Beck blamed this whole idea of “segregation” on “Progressives” and especially Woodrow Wilson.

MORE…

Why VFR is worth supporting, II

Alan M. writes:

VFR is an intellectual accelerator, doing for readers’ reasoning power what the CERN particle accelerator does with sub-atomic particles. The goal is shattering the hard carapace of liberalism—first in ourselves and then in the society around us. The initial blows of logic and reason are shocking only because they collide with the calcifications of untruths we have built as a shell for ourselves. Ultimately, what at first seemed painful is recognized as nourishing as we toss aside the shattered illusions and face reality head on with faith, hope, and, yes, love.

Which is worse—Romney’s slanders or Gingrich’s record?

Spencer Warren writes:

What you wrote last week about Romney being a slanderer is fair. But in my view the much more important point is that Gingrich’s colleagues, who owed their newly won power to him, in just a few years forced him out as Speaker because of his terrible flaws as a leader. This alone should disqualify him as a reputable candidate. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:08 PM

What’s wrong with Coulter’s case for Romney

Alexis Zarkov writes:

Most of Coulter’s essay tries to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by trying to convince the reader that Romney is really a conservative. The very Romney who said,

I believe the world is getting warmer and I believe humans have contributed to that. It’s important for us for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.… I love solar and (wind) power, but they don’t drive cars. And we’re not all going to drive Chevy Volts.

Amazingly, Coulter tells us that Romney wants to staple green cards to graduating foreign students. Does she think this is a conservative, pro-American position? Graduates in science and engineering have faced stagnant salaries for a very long time—there is no shortage, but Romney ignores that in his zeal to hold down American salaries.

Coulter would also have us believe that Romney is not the Republican establishment candidate. As pointed out in View from the Right only yesterday, Romney’s top donor is Paul Singer. That Paul Singer who was a major contributor to the Bush campaign. How much more Republican establishment can one get? Of course none of this makes a case for Gingrich. With Romney and Gingrich conservatives are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:33 AM

Site specializing in news on black violence

Max P. writes:

In case you do not know, New Nation News is a website where various local news stories from around the nation are linked. It is similar to Drudge in that there is no original content, just links to mainstream news sites. However, this site focuses exclusively on black-on-white and other minority related crime.

Since you frequently provide stories on this subject, I believe newnation.org would assist in your selections.

WARNING, February 1:

Michael P. writes:

When I visit the New Nation News site that you linked, my antivirus software (eset nod32) gives me the following alert:

http://newnation.org/Scripts/AC_ActiveX.js HTML/ScrInject.B.Gen virus connection terminated—quarantined

Might be a false positive, but I’d be cautious about sending readers there.

Coulter for Romney

Her usual snark in suspension, Ann Coulter makes an extended argument that Romney is

the most conservative candidate still standing, with the possible exception of Rick Santorum, who is bad on illegal immigration. (Santorum voted in the Senate against even the voluntary use of E-Verify by employers, which means he doesn’t want to do anything about illegal immigration at all.)

Romney is “moderate” only in demeanor - which is just another word game. His positions are more conservative than Gingrich’s, but he doesn’t scare people like Gingrich does. Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms were moderate in demeanor, too. No one would call them political moderates.

Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.

Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.

Levin against Romney

Mark Levin, like me, is appalled by Romney’s all-out slanders of Gingrich, slanders multiplied by Romney’s campaign millions. He writes that Romney will have so divided the GOP with his anything-goes attacks on Gingrich that he will be unable to unite the GOP if he is nominated. Levin has all but given up on a Republican presidential victory and says that the main effort must be to increase the number of Republican seats in the Congress.

- end of initial entry -

Roger G. writes:

“Levin has all but given up on a Republican presidential victory and says that the main effort must be to increase the number of Republican seats in the Congress.”

Good grief good grief good grief. This was the very point on which he mocked and ridiculed me when I called in after McCain secured the nomination.

LA replies:

Here is the incident, as Roger described it at VFR in December 2008:

Back in the spring, after McCain had secured the nomination, I called in [to Levin’s program] and stated that I thought conservatives should treat both nominees as opponents, and concentrate our efforts on the federal, state, and local races. To my shock, he was vicious and abusive in his response.… Among his insults, he asked if I thought I was Karl Rove; I wish I had thought to ask if it was unacceptable to raise a political issue on a political show, but I am not a fast thinker. And it had never occurred to me that he would act this way toward a caller who was polite, and was trying to present what—to me—still seems to have been a legitimate topic for discussion.

MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:13 PM

Gingrich in 2009 conference call strongly supported “must carry,” i.e., the individual mandate

I just came upon this devastating audio at the site Race 4 2012:

So now we know that Gingrich is strongly for amnesty in a yet to be determined but still wide open form, and is strongly for the idea that all individuals in America must purchase health insurance. How could anyone believe, after listening to this, that he will exert any serious effort to get Obamacare repealed? And how are Gingrich’s supporters going to reply to this? Will they say that the pro-individual mandate, pro-amnesty Newt Gingich is still their choice, because he’s more, uh, conservative than Mitt Romney?

I’ve said all along that Gingrich lacks a stable self, and that the more incendiary and/or conservative his words sound, the less meaning and reality they have. This would seem to apply to everything he has said in the campaign about his commitment to repeal Obamacare.

- end of initial entry -

Alexis Zarkov writes:

Listen carefully to the Gingrich audio, which sounds edited. If I understand him correctly, then his “must carry” includes the opportunity to opt out by posting a bond. If the bond would pay interest equal to its opportunity cost (around 4 percent per year) then there is no forced purchase. The bond would need to equal the average cost of an emergency room visit, which I’ll guess is less than $2,000. This would make Gingrich’s “must carry” fundamentally different from the mandate, which forces every resident to buy insurance from a private company with no opportunity to opt out. Most people could then avoid government mandated insurance, and stick with what they have now. Of course Obamacare is much more than the mandate, and it includes all sorts of new control over the medical insurance industry such as the coverage of preexisting conditions.

LA replies:

Fair enough. However, I’ve read elsewhere (was it Coulter’s article linked above?) that Gingrich favored the principle of Obamacare until last May.

Yes, here it is. Coulter writes:

But Gingrich did more than support Romneycare. As former senator Rick Santorum has pointed out, Gingrich supported a FEDERAL individual mandate to purchase health insurance from 1993 until five minutes ago—i.e., at least until a “Meet the Press” appearance just last May. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:36 PM

Why Michele Bachmann lost

Chris B. writes:

After viewing the embarrassment that overtook the Prime Minister of Australia this past week [here, here, and here], I was watching a clip from the presidential debates earlier on, and I believe I have solved your puzzlement as regards the reason for Michele Bachmann’s loss in the primaries. In the debates one would view the entire panel of candidates, look at the tall, broad shouldered men (not all handsome of course), and listen to their voices. But every time the cameras panned over to Michele it exposed her diminutive shoulders and tiny stature. Moreover, there was that soprano voice. Although more measured than that of a twelve year old boy, it carried about the same authority. In short, she lost because she was unable to man up. I believe it was Hillary Clinton’s inability to man up that resulted in her 2008 loss as well.

- end of initial entry -

January 30

Irv P. writes:

Chris B.’s comment is like chum in the water for a hungry bluefish (me), but I’m not biting. She didn’t “man up.” LAME! MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:30 PM

25-year-old Marine on date in Richmond is held up at gun point, hands over money, is shot anyway, in critical condition

The shooter is described as a “black male.” The victim is described as a male, no race. This makes it about an 85 percent likelihood that the victim was white. The fact that the perpetrator shot the victim after he gave him his money makes it even more likely that the victim was white.

From wric.com:

Richmond Police detectives need the public’s help to find and identify a man who shot a United States Marine during a robbery last night in Church Hill.

At approximately 8 p.m. Friday, the victim was walking with his girlfriend in the 600 block of North 33rd Street when they were approached by an unknown male who displayed a gun and demanded money. After the victims complied, the male shot the victim and ran away. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:11 PM

11-year-old boy on public transit pulls gun on mother with baby

The young savage’s mother, Shaquita Louis, wants him released under the recognizance of his aunt (just as the mother of one of the homicidal shopping cart hurlers in East Harlem who almost killed Marion Hedges and caused her permanent brain injury wanted him released). But let’s have some understanding for the family’s situation. The 11-year-old’s sister (more likely his half-sister), Yashanee Vaughn, was murdered last year by her 14-year-old boyfriend, Parrish Bennette.

KGW in Portland, Oregon has the story:

PORTLAND — An 11-year-old boy was arrested in downtown Portland Thursday night after he brandished a handgun in his waistband during an argument with a passenger on a MAX train.

The Oregonian reported he was ordered held in custody in juvenile court Friday.

Transit police were dispatched about 8:20 p.m. to the Old Town/Chinatown MAX stop on a report of someone with a gun on the train, said Sgt. Pete Simpson.Officers learned that a group of boys and girls, including two boys age 11 and 13, had been in a dispute with a passenger.

One of the boys had reportedly bumped into a woman’s baby stroller when getting on the train and an argument broke out. [LA replies: No, an “argument” did not “break out.” A black “youth” accosted a mother with baby (almost certainly white) and then threatened her life.]

During this dispute, the 11-year-old reportedly lifted his shirt to reveal a handgun in his waistband, which he began to pull out, Simpson said. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:21 PM

Why VFR is worth supporting

A commenter wrote at Conservative Heritage Times on January 26 (which happens to be my birthday):

Not everyone can blog with the consistency and breadth of a Lawrence Auster (he is almost his own magazine)…

Two writers, same joke

Last Thursday I wrote of …

… Gingrich’s call in 1988 for the Republicans to leave Reaganism behind and move boldly into the future of … neo-Rockefeller Republicanism (?), Tofflerian Future Shockism (?), a high-tech restoration of Me Tooism (?), or whatever it was that was on his ever-restless mind at the moment.

In her WSJ column that came out on Friday, Peggy Noonan writes:

But the point is Newt senses the lay of the land. If a new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism looked like it was about to take hold, he’d see the virtues in that. Right now the growth area looks like it’s in opposition to elites and establishments. So that’s where he is.

No larger point here. It’s just funny that Noonan and I both thought of the same joke, in almost exactly the same words (i.e., that Gingrich might readily embrace “neo-Rockefeller Republicanism,” or a “new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism”) to illustrate Gingrich’s promiscuous and erratic intellectual nature.

Rescued from libertarianism

Michael S. writes:

Kathlene M. wrote:

“I used to read NRO before I found your website. After that, I lost interest in the writing and opinions there, although I’ll sometimes visit NRO and check out the headlines.”

I can paraphrase that to reflect my own situation.

I used to read LewRockwell.com before I found your website. After that, I lost interest in the writing and most of the opinions there—along with the libertarian utopianism, chronic obsession with government evil (a fixation which I find to be debilitating and toxic), and the adolescent name-calling. (One writer there refuses to use the word “government”; he prefers “gunverment.” Get it? Clever, no? No, not really.) Unlike Kathlene M. and NRO, I do not sometimes visit LewRockwell.com and check out the headlines. I did that a few times, and every time I did, I was sorry. I realized I wasn’t missing anything.

Liberal Republican moneyman who pushed through homosexual “marriage” on NY State is top Romney funder and supporter

Kathlene M. writes:

Romney’s top donor and fundraising bundler is Paul Singer, the man who helped foist gay “marriage” on New York [see this and this]. Singer is also reported to be quite an attack dog. He finances reporters who use smears to attack opponents. This would explain the new viciousness behind Romney’s campaign.

Even though Romney signed the National Organization for Marriage pledge to protect traditional marriage, if he becomes President with Singer’s financial help, he will likely be working to undermine traditional marriage in other ways. I can’t get excited about Romney if he becomes the nominee, especially knowing that he’s supported by Paul Singer and other social liberals (i.e., people from the Guiliani and McCain networks).

From Politico: MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:01 PM

Diversity and the reign of fear

(Note, January 30th: this entry has been fine-tuned since it was posted Sunday morning.)

The other day Gingrich attacked Romney as the “most anti-immigration” candidate (or “anti-immigrant” candidate—the accounts differ), because Romney is not as pro-amnesty as Gingrich. I criticized Gingrich strongly for that. But now, showing once again that the two candidates are equally unprincipled, Romney has attacked Gingrich for having said in Florida in 2007 that people who only speak Spanish have consigned themselves to a “ghetto.” On Fox News this morning, the silly Chris Wallace kept going after Gingrich over this supposedly terribly offensive statement. Gingrich explained that he wasn’t referring to Spanish speakers, but to anyone who exclusively speaks any of the 200 languages other than English that are now spoken in this country. English, he said, is the language of the economy and commercial success (he did not call it the language of our culture, since the contemporary mainstream view is that the only thing that defines America is the economy), and someone who doesn’t speak English has cut himself off from the prosperous American way of life.

Now why was Gingrich’s statement offensive? Presumably because to say that people who don’t speak English are putting themselves in a ghetto is to denigrate their language as a “ghetto” language. It is to imply that they are culturally inferior. But if it’s bad to say that it’s bad for people in the United States not to speak English, that means that it’s good for people in the United States not to speak English. But, in reality, people in the U.S. who don’t speak English tend—just as Gingrich said—to be excluded from participation in the mainstream American economy and relegated to inferior status. Wouldn’t it then be offensive for a politician to declare that it’s perfectly ok for members of certain groups not to know English in this country, and wouldn’t he be raked over the coals for that?

So if you say that people should not limit themselves to a foreign language, you are putting them down; and if you say that it’s fine for them to limit themselves to a non-English language, you are still putting them down.

Yet no one—least of all the candidates who are accused of being anti-immigrant or insensitive toward Hispanics—ever points out the logical impossibility of not offending minorities under the rules of the game in diverse America—because that, too, would be offensive to minorities. In fact, it would be far more offensive than the first two possibilities, resulting in one’s being, not just attacked by a political opponent and questioned by Chris Wallace, but excluded altogether from mainstream American political life.

I am reminded of the Seinfeld episode, “The Cigar Store Indian,” in which Jerry is interested in a woman who is an American Indian, but can’t for the life of him avoid saying things that touch on American Indian sensitivities. He becomes increasingly fearful of her increasingly tyrannical displeasure with him, until he is almost paralyzed.

Here are some scenes from the episode (of course, seeing it on TV is far better than reading the script—the script does not convey the girlfriend’s threatening demeanor and Jerry’s terror): MORE…