John Pepple weighs in. There is quite a lot of good material at his place. Don't be put off by his blog's strange name.
Related: In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. Wherein I recall the best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ten from the Billboard Top 100 from 25 February 1967
The Seekers, Georgy Girl. Chart position: #5 The Australian group's first hit (1965) was I'll Never Find Another You.
Sonny and Cher, The Beat Goes On. Chart position: #6. Inane lyrics. "The teeny bopper is our new born king."
Spencer Davis Group, Gimme Some Lovin. Charted at #7. Captures the Dionysian drive of R & R. Check out this 1983 version!
Cannonball Adderley, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. Chart position: #11
Lefte Bank, Pretty Ballerina. Chart position: #15. The year before, Walk Away Renee. How sweet the illusions and transports of romantic love that wash over the souls of the young and not-so-young.
Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth. Charted at #25. "Paranoia strikes deep!"
Mamas and Papas, Dedicated to the One I Love. Chart position: #57. Outstanding, but doesn't get the length of the Shirelles' original.
Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song. Chart position: #69. "Slow down, you're movin' too fast!"
Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever. Chart position: #83.
James Carr, The Dark End of the Street. Chart position: #98. Great song. Better known is Linda Ronstadt's version.
The NRA’s Role in Electing Trump
Fred Barnes argues, very plausibly, that the National Rifle Association played a "critical role" in putting Trump over the top. Of course, the foolish and mendacious Hillary was very cooperative:
"I respect the Second Amendment," she [Hillary] said in the second debate. In the third, she went further. "I also believe there is an individual right to bear arms." But she quibbled with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld that right. She would gut the right by mandating that guns in homes be kept in pieces "to protect toddlers."
The stupidity of this beggars understanding. Apparently, for Hillary, the only safe gun is a useless gun, an instance of what philosophers call a scattered object:
Robert Paul Wolff Loses His Mind
Hear the Wolff howl.
“The Era of Empty Talk is Over”
The best line of Trump's CPAC speech.
With Trump the Rule of Law Returns
Andrew C. McCarthy is always good.
Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?
It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.
If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.
So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code.
Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.
Alan Colmes (1950-2017)
Being a nice guy covers a multitude of sins. I find it impossible not to feel sad over the passing of the gentlemanly and mild-mannered Alan Colmes who died at age 66. But he really was a foolish and benighted leftist. Better Right than nice. From a 2010 post of mine:
This [the racism charge] is now the party line of the Dems and toe it they will as witness the otherwise somewhat reasonable and mild-mannered Alan Colmes in this segment, Political Hatred in America, from The O'Reilly Factor. Colmes begins his rant around 6:07 with the claim that "what is driving this [the Tea Party protests] is racism." It looks as if Colmes is under party discipline; otherwise, how could so intelligent and apparently decent a man say something so blatantly false and scurrilous? That something so silly and vicious should emerge from the mouth of a twit like Janeane Garofalo is of course nothing to wonder at. What idiocies won't HollyWeird liberals spout? But Alan Colmes? If we remember that for the Left the end justifies the means, however, things begin to fall in place. The Left will do anything to win. Slanders, smears, shout-downs . . . all's fair in love and war. Leftists understand and apply what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.
UPDATE (2/24). A Slate leftard attacks the dead man:
Colmes was the most absurd, useless, and mocked television personality in America for many years, precisely because he was nice. In the context of Fox News, being a nice guy—and a “liberal” nice guy at that—meant being a buffoon, and a patsy. Colmes not only played the part to perfection—he defined it.
A Berlin-Style Wall?
The pointlessness of much contemporary political discourse was brought home to me once again last night. One Giselle Fernández was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor. In a blatant display of typical liberal-left mendacity she referred twice to a southern border wall as a "Berlin-style wall."
Perhaps the best evidence of the greatness of America and the failure of communism is that communist regimes need walls to keep people in whereas we need walls to keep them out. Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall. Now the leftists who make this comparison cannot be so obtuse as not to see its rank absurdity. But they make it anyway because they will say and do anything to win.
There is no point in further 'conversations.' Action by us, defeat for them.
For a good laugh, see the Telegraph piece below. Germany was once the land of poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker). Then it became the land of judges and hangmen (Richter und Henker) And now? Untergang des Abendlandes.
On Honoring Revolutionaries
To show honor and respect is a conservative practice. There is therefore something paradoxical about leftists erecting icons to iconoclasts. Or is there? Once in power, revolutionaries become conservative.
Marital Compatibility
She looked for her father and found him in me. I looked for the opposite of my mother and found anti-mater in her.
The Meaning of Trump
Analysis so good that if I start quoting it I'll end up quoting most of it. You knuckleheaded NeverTrumpers need to read this.
February in Arizona
February brings to the Sonoran desert days so beautiful that one feels guilty even sitting on the back porch, half-outside, taking it all in, eyes playing over the spring green, lungs deeply enfolding blossom-laden warmish breezes. One feels that one ought to be walking around in this earthly heaven. And this despite my having done just that early this morning. Vita brevis, and February too with its 28 days. The fugacity of February to break the heart. It's all fleeting, one can't get enough of it. All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity.
And now I head back outside, away from this too-complicated machine, to read simply and slowly some more from Stages on Life's Way and to drink a cup of java to stave off the halcyon sleepiness wrought by lambent light and long vistas on this afternoon in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.
NeverTrumpers and Others Losing their Minds and Morals Over Trump
Former Weekly Standard editor in chief Bill Kristol suggested in a tweet that if he faced a choice (and under what surreal circumstances would that happen?) between the constitutionally, democratically elected president and career government officials’ efforts to thwart or remove him, he would come down on the side of the revolutionary, anti-democratic “deep state”: “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it [emphasis added], prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” No doubt some readers interpreted that as a call to side with anti-constitutional forces against an elected U.S. president.
[. . .]
Fake news proliferates. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Representative Elijah Cummings recently attacked departing national-security advisor Michael Flynn by reading a supposed Flynn tweet that was a pure invention. Nor did Trump, as reported, have a serious plan to mobilize “100,000” National Guard troops to enforce deportations.
Other false stories claimed that Trump had pondered invading Mexico, that his lawyer had gone to Prague to meet with the Russians, and that he had removed from the Oval Office a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. — sure proof of Trump’s racism. Journalists — including even “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post — reposted fake news reports that Trump’s father had run a campaign for the New York mayorship during which he’d aired racist TV ads.
Literary Stride
We adjust our stride to the steepness of the terrain: the steeper the trail, the shorter the steps. A good writer watches his literary stride: the more difficult the subject matter, the shorter the sentences. Back on the flat he leaps and lopes and stretches his legs.