Posted under Science
Redheads are going extinct due to people with red hair and from red hair endemic regions increasingly outbreeding with mates from regions where red hair is not endemic.
The disappearance of redheads would be a tragedy. It is up to young as yet unmarried redheads to keep our numbers going. If you are redheaded, marry another redhead or at least someone with red hair in their family tree. Our future existence depends on you.
Posted under Politics & Science
Although the MSM like to portray Republicans as scientifically unsophisticated, statistics reveal otherwise. The recent GSS data survey, for instance, reveals that Republicans in fact are more scientifically literate than Democrats.
And as the Democratic Party continues to become the party of the NAACP and La Raza, expect this gap to widen.
Posted under Interventionism & NeoCons & Ron Paul
Sorry for all the Woods vs. Levin posts, but this one deserves its own post. The Daily Caller has a story about poor Mark Levin getting picked on by Ron Paul supporters. Curiously, nowhere does the story mention the brutal intellectual beatdown Woods administered to Levin that prompted the Ron Paul supporters to comment on Levin’s posts to begin with. Levin admits to sanctioning the censoring of opposing viewpoints.
Truth be told, I’m not the administrator of my social sites, but I back the administrator,” Levin said. “See, what happens folks is sometimes we get into these little discussions and the word goes out – flood the Facebooksite or whatever – through bloggers, through people who think by this kind of mob mentality, they’re going to persuade people. They don’t persuade anybody of anything. They annoy people and so the administrator has to clean out a bunch of them, particularly when they get into their hate modes. They keep linking back to other sites, which are intending to increase the hits on those other sites.”
Posted under Interventionism & NeoCons
Perpetual war and mayhem continue to be official DC policy, and damn the consequences, such as increased risk of terrorism and spiralling debt. The US will not keep its nose out of other people’s business, and it just can’t help it.
That’s exactly what Obama said last night in his totally unconvincing speech:
The US will intervene when it can and when massacres loom, Obama said. The responsibility of world leadership calls for no less, according to the president.
“Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different,” said Obama.
Pointing to this statement, Duke University political science professor Peter Feaver said, “That is a fairly artful embrace of American exceptionalism and of the doctrine of preemption.”
So the US is recklessly wasting borrowed money to fight a war which even its Secretary of Defense admits is not in our interest, which supports “rebels” whose allegiance is to al-Qaeda, and which Americans did not want to get involved in. Obama all but admits he cynically used the UN resolution to protect Libyan civilians as a cover to interject the US into yet another war — and we sit by passively and accept this?
And now our handlers want to expand the war by arming the rebels. That settles it — insanity is now the real guiding principle of the collapsing DC Empire. “American Exceptionalism” means that the US, unlike other nations, pursues self-immolation as a moral imperative. As Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters on Monday, “We don’t make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent.” Amen to that.
Besides, if a blood-crazed chickenhawk like Bill Kristol is happy with Obama’s policy, then you know it’s a terrible idea.
Posted under Interventionism & NeoCons
The post below was getting too crowded so I created a new post for additional links.
Here the New American reports on the story.
Update: There is now a “Mark Levin is scared to debate Tom Woods” Facebook group.
Update II: Riehl World View has a rather sophmoric attack on Tom Woods that conveniently fails to address the Constitutional issues at hand.
Update III: Libertypulse has this.
Update IV: There is a new Facebook page for people who have been censored by Mark Levin.
Update V: Tom Woods addresses the Levin controversy on the Mike Church Show.
Update VI: Intellectual heavyweight Levin is now calling Mike Church names. Apparently Church is a “schmuck” and a “kook.” Way to keep the debate high-minded there Levin.
Posted under Interventionism
Obama’s unconstitutional initiation of hostilities against Libya has prompted a lot of debate on the right about the limits of the President’s war making abilities, a debate, not to their credit, that very few on the right were willing to have when the President was a Republican. (Tom Woods and Jack Hunter excepted of course.)
Last week Tom Woods posted this: “The Phony Arguments for Presidential War Powers.”
Talk Radio interventionist blowhard, Mark Levin, later chimed in on war powers. I don’t think he was responding at this point to Tom Woods specifically, but he did have Ron Paul in mind, who he disrespectfully calles “RuPaul.”
Tom Woods responded with “Mark Levin Wrong on War Powers.”
Mark Levin then responded to Woods’ article with this: “Professor Thomas Woods Cutting and Pasting History for a Dogma”
Tom Woods replied to Levin with this at Lew Rockwell: “My Challenge to Mark Levin”
This is the most devestating part of Woods’ reply:
Let’s get to the primary sources. Mark Levin, here is my challenge to you. I want you to find me one Federalist, during the entire period in which the Constitution was pending, who argued that the president could launch non-defensive wars without consulting Congress. To make it easy on you, you may cite any Federalist speaking in any of the ratification conventions in any of the states, or in a public lecture, or in a newspaper article – whatever. One Federalist who took your position. I want his name and the exact quotation.
Here is Levine’s attempted reply. He now says he is moving on. (I would want to move on too if I just had my butt handed to me the way Levine has.)
And here is Woods’ reply to that.
And last but not least, here is Jack Hunter on Levin’s crazed war powers doctrine.
Update: This story is developing quicker than I can post.
Erick Erickson at Red State links to Levin.
Update II: Levin has deleted all the contrary and pro-Woods comments from his Facebook post. He should apply for a job moderating at Free Republic or Red State.
Also see this on Levin’s censorship.
Posted under Sports
Last year Patroon and CHT cast the good ju ju on Bulter and propelled them to the final game in the NCAA Tournament. Well obviously the ol’ CHT mojo is still with them this year.
If you don’t have a team left to root for in the tournament, then may I suggest you root for Butler. Little schools like Butler and underdogs like Richmond and VCU represents all that is right about the NCAA Tournament and basketball in general.
Since my team, the Georgia Bulldogs, is out, I would normally root for the SEC. And I have to root for Kentucky at least some because both my parents are from there and my Father still follows UK somewhat. But I’m going to put aside my normal rooting interest for the SEC and root for Butler over Florida. If Butler ends up playing UK, then I’m not sure what I will do.
But if you don’t have personal conflicts, then give a cheer for Butler. If a little guy team like Butler can win it all, then maybe a little guy blog like CHT can move the debate. Come on Butler, win one for all us little guys!
Update: FINAL FOUR BABY!
Posted under Interventionism & NeoCons
Whoa. David Horowitz, not a favorite of this blog, makes a remarkable confession about the Neocon Wars and the notion of “spreading democracy”:
The reality is that a totalitarian Islam is the vibrant and increasingly dominant movement in the Arab world. Any elections likely to take place will be on the order of one man, one vote, one time. Neo-conservatives are now cheering on the Obama administration’s reckless intervention in Libya, as though the past ten years have taught them nothing. The nation building effort in Iraq led to a squandering of American resources and a weakening of American power.
I’m still blinking in shock. If reality can blast its way through David Horowitz’ ideological blinders, there’s hope for just about anyone.
Hat tip to Americaneocon!
Posted under Uncategorized
One of the more fascinating conflicts to emerge from the Battle of Wisconsin this winter has been Left vs. Left. Phil Hands is the editorial cartoonist for the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s daily newspaper and describes himself as thus:
“This debate over Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill has been difficult for me. I have progressive values. I believe in gay marriage, I believe in mass transit, I believe in global climate change, I believe in abortion rights, I believe in urban planning and I believe in a single payer health care system. But on the issue of public employee compensation and the role that their unions play in our government, I find myself siding with conservatives.
I don’t have a problem with unions in the private sector. Private sector workers should have a chance to collectively bargain for a greater share of the profits they generate. While public sector workers perform valuable services that make society livable, they don’t generate profits for the state government. When public sector unions negotiate, the entity on the other side of the collective bargaining table isn’t some greedy corporation, it’s us, the taxpayers.
I believe that public employees should be well compensated for the valuable work they do. In fact, exceptional public employees should be exceptionally compensated (something that most unions have fought against in favor of pay based on seniority). But like the rest of us in this economy public employees need to make sacrifices.”
He isn’t the only liberal saying this. Neither columnists like Joe Klein or Richard Cohen are big fans of public unions and Michael Lind says they’ve become an anachronism and ” But in order to take advantage of a post-union America, liberals would have to create a popular political movement capable of replacing the lost legions of organized labor at the polls. In other words, American liberals would have to organize.”
I can’t help it but I have to smirk at that remark.
Meanwhile real organizing has been going in Wisconsin for recall campaigns and other political activities which the unions fully engaged in other activists like my friend Ben Manski, who has been toiling away with the Green Party in Wisconsin for many years. In a sense they are creating the “popular front” that pundits and writers like Lind can only talk about in abstract theory, which probably would have never come about had Gov. Walker left collective bargaining alone. Those who would probably have nothing in common with Manski and his crew find themselves in the same demonstrations because of it. It what writers like Thomas Frank have always wanted: more focus on economic issues where the Right is more vulnerable because of many’s fealty to big multi-national corporations or the well-to-do (like the Kochs). Lind and his cosmo crew are more focused in basically providing what Ed Clark always wanted “a low-tax liberalism”. Since the days of Fred Dutton’s Changing Sources of Power their view of politics is the “new class” or well educated and upper middle class will be the one with the power in the “new economy”. No doubt they were hubristic after Obama’s win in 2008 basically validated their view until 2010 taught them a very valuable lesson any VDARE.com reader would know: So long as 83 percent of registered voters are white and so long as the large class of traditionalists and baby boomers still exists and so long as their is a pool of white working class voters in many states across the country which have very little in the way of cosmos, the Right will always have a means to ascent, at least in the short run.
The root of this conflict goes back to Provo vs. Cosmo divide, which truly is the divide which runs through all American politics. It’s the divide between those living and work in cosmopolitan society (like Lind) and those who don’t (like Manski). It divides people who are activists or believe in politics at the grassroots and those are suspicious of it. It’s divides the Left, it divides the Right, it divides Libertarians too. The divide basically determines how one approaches politics, between those who believe in the top-down from those who believe in bottom-up.
The Leftists Chris Hedges has an interesting take on this in thesis “Death of the Liberal Class”
Posted under Uncategorized
“Agressive Power, Amoral Authority” from SARTRE over at BATR.org
“Like the Weekend? Credit Henry Ford not the Unions” from J.J. Jackson at Liberty Reborn
“Your Absence is Revealing” by Robert Rohlfing at The Drumbeat of Liberty
“The New Lisbon” by Patrick Deenan at Front Porch Republic
“Crony Fascism Strikes Again” by David Stockmann at Lew Rockwell.com
Chronicles Dr. Srdja Trifkovic can’t enter Canada. See why here at Chronicles
and yours truly with “Bachmann Country” over at TAC
Posted under Culture & Globalism & Political Correctness
Here’s my TakiMag article on an under-reported phenomenon, the antifa movement. It grew out of the punk rock scene, but is more reminiscent of Mussolini’s Black Shirts – hence the title.
Posted under Interventionism
Daniel Larison isn’t impressed, but Daniel tends to be a pessimist about such matters. I am not kidding myself that the conservative movement is on the verge of embracing Ron Paul style non-intervention in toto, but what I am encouraged by is the trend line. The trend is toward skepticism of reflexive interventionism, even if it is sometimes incoherently expressed. Here is my reply to Daniel.
This is Daniel at his “glass half
fullempty” best.I have actually been encouraged by the conservative response. The best way I can think of to describe the conservative reaction to Libya is all over the map. No it hasn’t been the universal condemnation that we would like, but that would be expecting too much. But neither has there been near universal approval as there was for Iraq.
There has been wide spread skepticism about the wisdom of intervening in this case. There has been criticism of allowing the UN to push us into this. There has been criticism of not going to Congress for authorization. Of course the usual suspects have been cheerleading for intervention and even complaining that Obama dithered too long and has ruled out ground troops, but these folks are increasing isolated and can now be challenged with impunity. Even National Review has published some critics.
Take a look at a mainstream conservative website/blog such as American Spectator. Both the posts and the comments have been all over the map on this. While some of the criticism appears to be inchoate criticism of Obama, and I highly doubt there would be as much opposition if McCain was in the White House, what is clear is that there is not a uniform “official” conservative position on this other than maybe “Obama is a screw up.”
This is progress. Compare this to 2003 and 2004, for example, when criticism of reflexive interventionism would get you labeled a traitor.
Posted under Election 2012 & Ron Paul
The State Column has the story.
Mr. Paul won the California Republican Party convention poll over the weekend. The Texas congressman defeated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Paul, who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, won 17.8 percent of the 202 votes cast in the informal straw poll conducted at a booth run by the Republican Liberty Caucus of California. Mr. Romney and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
That Paul won a Republican Convention poll is encouraging, although the poll was run by the Paul friendly RLC.
Posted under Election 2012 & Ron Paul
I have been seeing/hearing this rumor a lot recently.
IMO, it is too early for a Rand Paul run. It was too early for a Barack Obama run for that matter, but Obama had been a State legislator before becoming a first term, two year Senator. Plus it is not fair to the voters of Kentucky.
I hope Ron Paul runs again. My concern is that this Rand talk might be a trial balloon of sorts from the Paul camp. I can’t imagine people close to Rand would float this rumor without the consent of his father.
I had assumed that another Ron Paul run was a virtual certainty. This has me worried that maybe he isn’t feeling up to another run.
Posted under Conservatism & Interventionism & Subsidiarity
We, the People, are fed up with the Feds. We’ve had enough of their lying, their cynical manipulation, and their outright theft. In the past, when our temperatures started to rise, a nice little war would distract us from our REAL enemies, and we’d aim our outrage at the scapegoats our handlers had selected for us.
But it’s not working anymore. This Gallup poll reveals there’s little of the usual “rally ’round the flag” effect in reaction to Obomba’s Obama’s unconstitutional and cowardly attack on Libya:
The 47% of Americans approving of the action against Libya is lower than what Gallup has found when asking about approval of other U.S. military campaigns in the past four decades.
Americans showed the highest level of support for the 2001 military action in Afghanistan that was a response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Americans also widely supported U.S. airstrikes against Iraq in 1993 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Support for the current involvement in Libya is also much lower than support for U.S. airstrikes against Libya in 1986 in response to the Libyan bombing of a German nightclub that killed two American servicemen.
The “rally ’round the flag” strategem is an old trick that once worked like a charm. For example, look how successful George W. Bush was in his use of 9/11. He picked Saddam Hussein as the target for the Empire’s collective two-minute hate. The new authority and prestige that resulted were quickly translated into the USA Patriot Act, which gave DC wonderful new powers to police and subdue its citizens, as well as other Federal power grabs, including the Prescription Drug Plan. And Bush came dangerously close to ramming through his beloved amnesty for illegal aliens.
As Steve Walt has warned, the neocon-liberal alliance is powerful. But this latest poll shouts loud and clear that more Americans have seen that that power is based on pure fraud. The party is just about over. Good riddance.
Posted under Immigration & population
Too many people – the world’s worst enemy
Robert Henderson, Quarterly Review, Winter 2010
A hulking elephant sits ignored in the green crusaders’ room. Amidst all the angst about man-made greenhouse gases, the greatest and most obvious cause of increases is ignored by mainstream politicians – the already great and rapidly rising population of the world and the rapid spread of industrialisation to major parts of what until recently was
the Third World . The world population is projected to reach 7 billion in 2011. Extrapolations to 2050 go as high as 9.5 billion (1). At a generous estimate, a billion live in the developed world in 2010. If the 9.5 billion projection for 2050 comes true, the disproportion between what are now the developed countries and the developing countries now will have become even more skewed in favour of the developing world, because the populations of underdeveloped countries have startlingly younger populations than those of the developed world, viz:
“One of every six people on earth is an adolescent. In the developing world, more than 40 percent of the population is under age 20. The decisions these young people make will shape our world and the prospects of future generations.” (2)
The US Bureau of Census projections for the populations of individual countries for 2050 show only one country (the United States) from the currently developed world in the largest twenty countries by population in 2050, with the first European country (Germany) coming in at number 22 (3).
If the swelling world population was overwhelmingly due to increases in the still very white First World , you may be sure that we would be daily berated for our selfish breeding. We would be told that any increase in our population was at the expense of the Third World, that the production of every extra Western mouth to feed, house, clothe and supply with energy was absolutely unconscionable. Western governments would be signing up to programmes of ever more punitive reductions in their countries’ greenhouse emissions and some of the bolder would be advocating the rationing of children.
But the overwhelming majority of people living today do not live in the developed world and the projected future expansion of the world’s population is due almost entirely to increases in the developing world….
Posted under Interventionism
I, like 99% of my fellow Americans, am not up on my Libyan history. This excellent article by Justin Raimondo has helped me understand what is going on there much better. It is a must read.
Despite what many interventionists seem to think, all Muslims are not the same. Libya is a unique situation with a unique history. You can’t understand what is going on there without understanding this history. This is not simply dictator vs. Muslim Brotherhood backed rebels. The rebels are more secessionists than they are revolutionaries.
Posted under Uncategorized
I’ve given the GOP establishment plenty of grief over the years. But the epitome of this establishment, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, has actually given the proper response in the wake of nation’s latest war which did on Face the Nation this morning:
“Lugar warned that the U.S. is investing huge sums of money in a foreign endeavor at a time when the domestic economy is still struggling.”It’s a strange time,” he said. “Almost all of our congressional days are spent on budget deficits, outrageous problems. Yet, at the same time, all of this passes, which is a very expensive operation.”
No only this but Lugar has also called for Congressional discussion, debate and ultimately a vote on the policy itself, so that our country cannot just go to war when the UN and the Arab League says it’s okay to do so. It seems Lugar and others in the establishment are rediscovering their roots in the Republican Party traditional foreign policy, the kind he grew up and began his public career with.
Of course there are other responses today, whether from Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum or John McCain, and predictably enough they either fall in one of two categories: 1). Not enough and 2). Not soon enough. In other words its criticism of the policy after the fact which means its no criticism at all because it agrees with fundamentals of the policy, just not the details. One again when it comes to foreign policy President Obama has all the cards…unless there’s a groundswell of opposition coming Congress.
This means its up to the Tea Partiers (Rand Paul has already announced his opposition) to remember one of the reasons they came together was to restore Constitutional government and they can do so by demanding the President either gives a Declaration of War or Congress cuts off funding for this little enterprise. Now’s their chance. If they really believe the country is broke, how praytell can we afford paying for another war? Cutting funding to NPR? Do they really believe the President can take us to war whenever he wants? If not, then now’s the time to do something about it. If they don’t, I’ll root for Lugar in his upcoming GOP primary for re-election than any Tea Party phony who lets his Jacksonian nationalism once again get in the way fiscal discipline, Constituional law and just plain old common sense.
(By the way, if conservatives wish to remain consistent, you’ll take after Palin for criticism the President’s policy in India. After all the grief the Dixie Chicks or Al Gore received for doing the exact same thing. What’s good for the goose, right?)
Posted under Interventionism & Iraq & Obama
The Evil Empire has launched yet another illegal war:
The U.S. Navy fires the first U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles against Libyan leader’s Muammar al-Qaddafi’s air defenses Saturday, a military source tells Fox News.
Where does Obama think he got the authorization to launch this attack? Like George W. Bush, Obama pretties up his illegal acts with piles of self-congratulatory double-talk:
“Our consensus was strong, and our resolve is clear. The people of Libya must be protected, and in the absence of an immediate end to the violence against civilians our coalition is prepared to act, and to act with urgency,” President Barack Obama said in Brasilia, Brazil, on the first day of a three-country Latin American tour.
I suppose the people of Libya are more important than the people of Yemen and Bahrain, whose governments are killing them, too — but the US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain, and President Saleh of Yemen is a US puppet, so don’t expect DC to do anything about those dictators. Some dictators are better than others.
An overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to US intervention in Libya — but then, our betters in DC ignore us on other issues, such as illegal immigration.
Isn’t it wonderful to live in a peaceful democracy?
Posted under Uncategorized
Chilton Williamson had a very thoughtful essay in this month’s issue of Chronicles which reflects upon the tsunami, earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan and could encompass which takes place in our “post-modern” world. Here’s an important excerpt:
“What the postmodern world will not recognize is that it is vulnerable to the exact degree that it is marvelous, It is exquisitely fragile, not least because it is founded on the same exquisite ephemera which makes up its substance. Indeed, we are aware of this fragility. The postmodern world stands with bated breath in anticipation of catastrophic blows to its fantastic, nearly expansive and ultimately unfathomable structure: power outages, computer crashes, hacking by terrorist and enemy spies, viruses, systematic malfunction and so forth. It also lives in fear of late-industrial and postmodern weaponry, weapons of mass destruction, sparing employed since their inception but who can say for how much longer?
I am not a statistician or even a bridge player, but certainly it seems reasonable to expect that, sooner or later, all hell must break loose among the nations of the world and its highly mobile, non-national entities. If the cyber network system implodes or is taken down and of war, invasion or revolution should occur internationally, the postmodern world will vaporize like an exorcised genie, only the potsherds of the vessel from which it issued remaining behind. Mankind would find itself rudely returned to something like the original state of nature.
Although I doubt he had it in mind, Mr. Williams may well be channeling this movie as an example of what he means.