Doing Well by Doing Good

A successful urologist I know told me that he and his colleagues want to do well by doing good.  An excellent formulation, but inapplicable to Joe Biden.  He wants to do well whether or not he does good. He wants such  trappings and results of worldly success as power and position, money and property,  even if he must destroy the country to get them. Good old Traitor Joe, violator of sacred vows, brazen liar, serial plagiarist, slanderer of decent people, threat to the peace and stability of the nation and the world.  If you support him, you are as despicable as he is. You might also consider that a vote for him is a vote for Kamala Harris. 

You say you don't like Donald Trump? I don't like him that much either. But politics is a practical pursuit. It is not about perfect versus imperfect but about better versus worse. I invite you to give some thought to the question whether you and your family and the nation and the world will be better off with another term of Trump or another of Biden. I invite you, for your own good, to inform yourself and exercise whatever critical faculties you possess.

Journalism is Dead!

When Bill O'Reilly said as much years ago I thought he was exaggerating. It is certainly no exaggeration now, if it is lamestream, 'woke'-captured,  Democrat shill outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR) and the Washington Post (WaPo) we are talking about.  Here:

But we can thank Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, for revealing the main reason for journalism’s dire situation: Americans these days just don’t trust the news.

Berliner’s first-person account of the past near-decade at NPR – from Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign through the present – reveals a litany of reasons for this loss of faith. Berliner argues that NPR’s increasingly leftward tilt, lack of transparency, ideological groupthink and prioritization of diversity of identity and physical appearance above other values have led the organization astray.

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of  it, write them a check!  Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support.  We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made.  If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made?  

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support.  And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.* If you deny the increasingly leftward tilt of NPR, even unto 'wokery,' then you are delusional and not worth talking to.  So I'll charitably assume that you are sane and admit the bias.  The next question I will put to you is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that half if not most of us in this land find objectionable.  I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR. 

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty.  But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons.  I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad).  I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something that ought to be done.

As for WAPO, see here for their egregious mis-reporting of the Dexter Reed shooting.  Had Dexter read my Substack entry, What to do if a cop stops you, he might be alive today.

But he is dead, having foolishly, illegally, and immorally brought about his own death, as is journalism!

_________________

*I stand not only for the separation of church and state, but also for the separation of leftism and state.

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Dreher on Carlson

The former comments on the latter's recent speech.  Dreher:

It is so very, very, very difficult to wake up people to what is happening, what has been happening, and what is probably going to happen. I have experienced in my personal life how the Everything’s Fine™ mentality can destroy everything, and I see it everywhere in our culture and society.

Quite so. People need to wake up.  Wake up and 'woke' down.

It's astonishing how fast we are collapsing. Second Amendment rights for illegal aliens? Elimination of the bar exam in Oregon and other states?

My Substack article, The Conservative Disadvantage, is relevant.

Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Remark

Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily discern from my Rand category, this term from her lexicon does earn a non-plenary MavPhil endorsement.

Context matters!

Tucker Carlson on What is to be Done

We have been discussing how to proceed against our anti-civilizational political enemies. This essay by Carlson is not all that good, but it is worth a quick read-through. His points about truth and death are spot on.

Nicole Gelinas in Regressives explains how a healthy progressivism transmogrified into regressivism rendering Gotham the shithole it now is.

The beauty of blog is that the blogger is under no editor who might take umbrage at the occurrence of 'transmogrified' and 'shithole' in one and the same sentence.

2024: The Last Year of the Republic?

A New York friend of mine writes,

When I settled in Jackson Heights after leaving Mom's Bronx nest almost a half-century ago, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Great architecture, uncongested sidewalks, a police presence, and elderly ladies taking a stroll in the early evening were among the first things that struck me. It's now, to coin a  cliché, a third-world shithole run into the ground by "progressives." Few of its current denizens remember when it was otherwise.

The same friend thinks we won't make it to November.  When he so opined some months back, I thought that this might just be perspectival distortion due to his perch in Jackson Heights.  But he may well be right.  Another friend sends me here where we read some concrete suggestions of the sort that I have been asking for, but Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Levin,  and so many other astute commentators fail to make, content as they are merely to analyze and report:

. . . the next eight months should be spent getting prepared.

So, yes, I want you to vote in November — and, yes, I want you to prepare for the communist takeover of America when your vote won’t matter anymore. That might seem contradictory or incoherent but it’s basic strategy: you plan to win the battle, but you also plan for an orderly retreat so that you can survive to fight another day.

No, I’m not being gloomy or hopeless. I’m not telling you to quit. I’m not encouraging you to stop voting. I’m telling you to get prepared. What does that really mean? It means you should get a satellite phone. You should buy more guns and ammo. You should stockpile medicine and water and food. Hold cash. Hold gold and silver. Have an emergency plan with your friends and family.

It’s time to get serious.

{. . .]

You do realize that you’re in the middle of a global conspiracy to end the democratic West, right? You’ve heard about The Great Reset haven’t you? You don’t want to believe it’s true — of course. That’s why you keep ignoring the obvious signs.

That’s called: magical thinking.

We’re already at the stage of the communist revolution in which 320,000 illegal aliens have been flown into the United States by the Biden regime to occupy your country and to eventually serve as soldiers and police who are loyal to the communists.

We’re already at the stage when the agents of the Biden regime are openly admitting that they will not allow Trump to hold the office again if he’s elected. They’re telling you he should be denied classified briefings right now. They’re telling you that it’s time to dissolve the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and order American soldiers to disarm the people. They will not allow a peaceful transfer of power.

I hope that I’m wrong — butwhat happens to you if I’m right?

This is good advice. We don't despair or give up, we fight on "in the gloaming" to use my poetic phrase. We vote and we prep. Both. It's twilight time for the West, and while it is true that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk (as per the Hegelian trope), and we philosophers rejoice at the wisdom gained when the bird takes flight, we philosophers still attached to gross-material bodies  endeavor to push that final denoument as far into the future as possible. After all, no one KNOWS whether or not there is anything beyond this scene of strife, this miserably mundane mundus sensibilis. (Am I sending a coded message that only white-supremacist dogs can hear?)

We fight on. We vote and we prep. And when we vote we do so not only with ballots but with our feet and our wallets.  Buy  a satphone. I hadn't thought of recommending that. Excellent suggestion for something you can do.  Take the rest of Emerald Robinson's advice.

But don't expect any help from the Judas Iscariots and con artists of the pseudo-con Right. David French is a prime example as are Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney,  Chris Christie, and so many others. Turncoats, quislings, yap-and-scribble lapdogs of the Left, cuckservative clowns, worse than useless, worse even than the cadre-commie anti-civilizational woke-joke leftards.

French and Pence are justly pilloried here.

UPDATE (3/16)

That well-fed, miserably misguided matron Liz Cheney is torn to pieces by Kash Patel here.

The greatest con job ever to happen in American politics is the false Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative. The singular mission of this narrative is to stop Donald Trump from ever setting foot in the Oval Office again. 

A key pillar of the left’s propaganda about insurrection is to distort the truth surrounding whether Trump authorized, prior to Jan. 6, the deployment of National Guard troops to keep order on that day. The main architect of this disinformation campaign is former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.  

Issues and Insights is another good source of anti-totalitarian punch-back. This article, for example:

Democrats don’t support open borders for humanitarian reasons. They want the lines erased because they see every illegal alien as a likely Democratic voter crucial to their political power grab. But there’s another reason: They want to increase the populations of Democratic states to boost their representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

Apparently it’s not enough for Democrats to have become authoritarians, they have to be corrupt, too.

Of course this is no surprise. Only the corrupt become authoritarians. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek showed in chapter 10 of “The Road to Serfdom” why socialist systems never have decent people in charge.

“Bad men,” Hayek explained in Why the Worst Get on Top, have no inhibitions about running other peoples’ lives. It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited,” he wrote in 1944, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

Put another way, by Dune author Frank Herbert, “​​Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”

And thus we understand why the Democratic Party is overflowing with the most wretched people imaginable. It’s a party that draws in the worst among us in much the same way communism attracted the Lenins, Stalins, Maos and Castros.

The kakistocrats that captain the Democratic Party are so lacking in principle and so filled with villainy that they are using illegal aliens as pawns in their scheme to establish unopposed, unchallengeable power.

How can we know this? Because not a single Democrat voted last week in favor of an amendment from Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty that would allow only citizens to be “counted for the purposes of allocating congressional districts and electoral votes.”

When Hagerty offered the amendment, “the Democrats just went nuts,” he said. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer “threatened to shut the government down.”

The Charlottesville Lie

The only sure way to stop a leftist from lying would be by stopping him from talking. The Biden administration is one of the most, or the most, mendacious in our history. Copycat that he is, Biden saw the Clintons and Obama get away with it and resolved to go them one better. A brazen liar and serial plagiarist, truth decay has rotted his soul. Will Nancy Pelosi pray for him?   Dennis Prager:

Most people will tell that you that President Trump called Neo-Nazis “fine people” during his famous press conference following the Charlottesville riot. But he never did. So, why do so many believe it? CNN political analyst Steve Cortes explains how the Charlottesville lie happened and why it’s so dangerous. See the video here and then pass it on to family and friends. Then after they’ve seen it, ask them if they still believe “the lie”?

Under six minutes.

Reading Now: Alex Marlow, Breaking Biden

Subtitle: "Exposing the hidden forces and secret money machine behind Joe Biden, his family, and his administration." (Threshold, 2023).  Excerpt:

Intellectually, Republicans understand that to have a nation, you need a border.  [. . .] But the establishment isn't going to solve a problem if the solution is going to cost them a lot of (any?) money, even if the fate of our nation depends on it.

Unless, of course, we are talking about Ukraine's border with Russia. Then it's essential, heroic even, to have a border and defend it. After all, that border isn't keeping out cheap workers and future voters.  (p. 249)

The RINOs and the Democrats are one in that they both want open U. S. borders, albeit for different reasons. The RINOs want cheap labor while the Dems want future votes. Thus talk of a 'uniparty' is apt. The RINOs are in cahoots with the woke globalist plutocrats and have no concern for American workers or American culture. They think they will always be able to find sanctuary somewhere with their wealth and connections, and in the meantime they are content to be lapdogs of the Left and continue to receive invitations to the toniest Beltway soirees. The 'cuckservative' label fits them nicely.  Civility and 'character' are so important to Mitt Romney, for example, that he refuses to support Trump because of his 'bad character' while ignoring that of Biden which is far worse. Liz Cheney is another disgusting specimen of this Never-Trumper species.

Marlow sums up his book here.