The Devil's grip on post-America's throat is leaving thumbprints

A Sprite commercial, for the love of God:

In an inexplicable move, Sprite has released a new commercial that has nothing to do with soda and everything to do with force-feeding the public transgender theology dressed up as love and acceptance. What this has to do with quenching thirst, I have no idea.

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire makes an interesting point. "Someone please explain the ethical difference between an ad that promotes breast binding and an ad that promotes anorexia. I bet you can't." First, both conditions are mental disorders. Body dysmorphia is nearly indistinguishable from gender dysphoria. Both people look into a mirror and see something that is not there, but only one will be treated properly for it. The other will be sent off to butchers who will remove healthy body parts to indulge the patient's delusion. Worse, minor children suffering from gender dysphoria are given sterilizing drugs that are not fully understood nor studied.

Corporations that get on the LGBTQWTF bandwagon are not new. Every June we must put up with the endless rainbow logos and virtue-signaling that takes over everything. But the choice to release this commercial in November, several months after Pride Month, is one more signal that the Transgender Mafia is stepping up their game and you will not be getting a reprieve for the rest of the year.

It's not enough to inundate people with transgender propaganda in the month of June. We must be subjected to it every single day of the year until we all conform and celebrate mental disorders. Those who suffer from similar disorders don't think this approach of accepting and celebrating illness is helpful. 

And one of the few corporations left in post-America that merited admiration for putting its fealty to Christian faith front and center has begun the process of surrender to The Enemy:

Chick-fil-A said Monday that it has stopped donations to several Christian organizations after receiving backlash from LGBT rights activists over the last several weeks.

The U.S. fast food chain said that as it expands, it will no longer donate to the Salvation Army, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which opposes same-sex marriage. The company’s charity, the Chick-fil-A Foundation, has donated millions of dollars to the two organizations.

“We made multi-year commitments to both organizations and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018,” a representative for Chick-fil-A said, saying the chain will now focus its charitable donations on “education, homelessness and hunger.”

The franchise, famous for closing on Sunday and including Bible verses on its paper cups, plans to donate a total of close to $9 million to charity include a $25,000 to a local food bank for each new restaurant the company opens.

“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Tassopoulos told Bisnow. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”

Pray without ceasing for this nation. Almighty God will not put up with post-America's thrusting of its middle finger heavenward forever. And pray to be strong as the depravity and the resultant divine wrath make it every more challenging to go forth arrayed in His full armor.

It is so very late in the day.

 

 

We have leapt off the precipice

Two news items for you to consider in their sum total.

A couple of days ago, LITD posted about Bill de Blasio's request for a 90-day review of "symbols of hate" around NYC.

How long did you think it was going to take for this landmark to get included?

It now looks possible that de Blasio may consider one of Manhattan’s most famous statues as such a symbol.

As reported by CBS News, the mayor said during last night’s Democratic mayor debate that the statue is under review, stating that “[w]e have to look at everything here.”

Earlier in the week, one of de Blasio’s key allies in the city council spoke out against the statue, calling Columbus a “controversial figure” for many.

“I will wait for the commission, as I said Christopher Columbus is a controversial figure to many of us particularly in the Caribbean and I think that that has to be looked at, when you have to look at history we have to look at it thoroughly and clearly,” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said during a rally calling for another statue to be taken down.

And then this development from the other coast:

California may see itself as a leader on criminal-justice reform, but it is on its way to creating a whole new class of criminals: citizens who use “him” to refer to a man and “her” for a woman.

The “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Long-Term Care Facility Resident’s Bill of Rights” has already been passed by California’s state senate and unanimously recommended by its state assembly’s judiciary committee. It would impose left-wing dogma by force of law if it gets much further.

For now it is limited to nursing homes and intermediate-care facilities, but there is no reason for it to stop there. According to First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, it is “pretty unlikely that, if this law is enacted, such prohibitions would be limited just to this [nursing home] scenario.” The focus on nursing homes, one suspects, was chosen not because there is an epidemic of elderly transgender people being “misgendered” by their caretakers, but simply because the elderly make for a particularly sympathetic test case.

However, our sympathy should also extend to the caretakers. If one of their residents wants to be called “ze” and “zir” — or really anything else, according to the law — they had better think twice before refusing. While New York City threatens all employers and landlords with large fines for refusing to use an individual’s preferred pronouns, California’s politicians are going further — they want jail time for dissenters.

How to speak meaningfully about our current juncture is an increasingly vexing challenge. Is there a way to frame it that doesn't come off as trite? "Ten years ago all this would have been met with derisive laughter!" Well, yes, but clearly something very insidious was working steadily past all and any assumptions about basic normalcy, and allowed to metastasize until ready for its surprise attack.

The fact that government, with its monopoly on the use of legitimate force, is being brought into it, passing laws that force us to untether ourselves from all that our common sense confirms, is perhaps not as grim in its implications as the backing this madness has from powerful cultural institutions: professional sports leagues, manufacturing and technology companies, universities. That it's all now being made the stuff of legal code is just kind of the final, inevitable step in the process.

Yes, polls show that the majority of post-Americans don't want all these statues coming down, and, while I haven't specifically looked into it at this point, I daresay that sentiment regarding "ze" and "sir" nonsense runs in a similar fashion.

But something pivotal has occurred that renders that moot. The Great Leveling Project will move forward, and what you and I think about it matters not.

The problem is that this Project will at some point so irrefutably run into the basic architecture of this universe - also known as hard reality - that failure of basic societal functions will be the norm. It will be an utterly unforgiving moment.

I suppose, like medieval monks, the handful of Christians and Jews who actually put the doctrine of their faith before worldly concerns can provide a safe haven for those who refuse the Kool-Aid and look for refuge somewhere in the ruins. But most post-Americans are going to wear their badge of preference - "Trump is great and the fake-news media and Congressional squishes are all that prevent him from blessing this country with his agenda!", "Trump overtly enables bigotry!", "Trans people are being excluded from the larger movement for black liberation!", "If we can get GDP growth above 4 percent, everything will be great!" "I just want to be left alone to amuse myself!" - and thereby become less and less equipped to see the final ruin.

Another day, another hope that perhaps the name of this blog will be rendered obsolete dashed.

Tuesday roundup

Jay Nordlinger at NRO has a great piece on the politics of pronouns. A taste:

In Davos one year, I moderated a panel, and asked that each participant “say a few words about himself.” It crossed my mind to add “or herself,” but, in that split second, I thought, “No, everyone is grown up here. This is not Smith College. They know about English.” I was wrong. The first panelist was a woman — an anthropology professor — who said, “To begin with, I am not a ‘himself,’ I am a person.” The woman next to her — her partner, I believe — applauded, loudly, angrily, and alone. It was the sound of two hands clapping, so to speak. An incredibly awkward moment. And it taught me, or reaffirmed, that standard, or once-standard, English can be risky.

Dennis Prager's Townhall column today is called "A Guide to Basic Differences Between Left and Right". A Taste:

Economic GoalLeft: equality
Right: prosperity
Primary Role of the StateLeft: increase and protect equality
Right: increase and protect liberty
GovernmentLeft: as large as possible
Right: as small as possible
Family IdealLeft: any loving unit of people
Right: a married father and mother, and children
Guiding TrinityLeft: race, gender and class
Right: liberty, In God We Trust and e pluribus unum
Good and EvilLeft: relative to individual and/or society
Right: based on universal absolutes

Nicholas Pell at Reason on why Hamilton is a crappy musical. A taste:

Of course, shit music and feels-over-reals weren't the whole problem with America in 2016—and they aren't the biggest deal facing us in 2017, either. No, the worst thing about this present moment in time is the smugness with which zillionaires and their sycophants on the coasts piss all over anyone who does actual work for a living.

That's not just one of the main reasons that Trump won the election. That attitude makes for garbage art.

Historically speaking, you've got high art and folk art, each with their own set of aesthetic guidelines and measuring sticks. What's historically anomalous is commercial art—art that exists not due to the patronage of cultured elites or through the unrewarded efforts of the hoi polloi. It's art that exists to make money.

Art that exists to make money isn't a bad thing. A lot of the best music of the 20th century was commercial art. The Beatles are probably one of a handful of things anyone will remember about the 20th century in 500 years, a stunning example of commercial art as inspired genius. What's irritating, though, is when well-connected millionaires make art for the sake of signaling their moral superiority over the masses on the basis of their correct beliefs. Hamilton has become a sort of avatar of the Lena Dunham Democratic Party against the rest of the world, perhaps best displayed by the cast lecturing Vice President Elect Mike Pence (the closest thing to a Wal-Mart greeter they'll ever be in the same room as) about tolerance.

Tickets for Hamilton start between $179 and $199, with high-end tickets going for $849. Once they hit the secondary market (A.K.A. scalpers) you're looking at between $650 and $1500 on Stubhub. Is this because it's the best musical on Broadway? Or is it because Hamilton is this season's most fashionable way to signal liberal respectability and status among the One Percenters?

This isn't speaking truth to power. This is power telling the rest of us what truth is. There's nary a hint of self-awareness as those only vaguely aware of poverty and toil through a sociology textbook deign to lecture us little people about America's 'real values.' That's what's wrong with America in the current year.

And the Iranian government has put up a huge billboard in Tehran. to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the capture of the US Navy personnel.

Wednesday roundup

In the course of an essay at The American Thinker entitled "How to Blast Away the Left's Attacks on Manliness," a sneak peak at the argument he fleshes out more fully in his new book This Will Make a Man Out of You: One Man's Search for Hemingway and Manliness in a Changing World, Richard Miniter makes an observation on a scene from cinematic history that I'd never quite looked at in the way he invites us to see it:

If being “manly” is akin to sexism and worse, men should then be something else, but the cabal of Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media haven’t given men anything else to be. They are simply told not to be men. They are guilty from birth and so should just shut up.

This empty view actually can be traced back to Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 classic movie starring James Dean. In the movie Dean keeps asking his father “what does it mean to be a man?” but his father doesn’t know. Dean is given no answers. He keeps slouching and looking at the ground and playing the lost young man brilliantly, but no one gives him any answers. Now, well over a half-century later, this is still where liberal Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media have left the question. They are very concerned about women and women’s rights, but they are not inquisitive at all about what makes men -- and therefore with what they have been attacking.

Of course, we know that the logical - make that utterly illogical - conclusion to which leftist attacks on manliness bring us is the idea that people whose self-obsession has rendered them deeply troubled - that would be the "transgendered" and the even more exotic strains of "gender fluidity" that continue to appear in the fetid petri dish that is post-American culture - are perfectly normal and ought to be treated as such.

Which is how you get to situations like this:

The current law in the State of Texas requires schools to allow parents access to 100% of all their children’s records, academic, disciplinary, health, you name it. The only exception are instances where something has happened that has triggered the school to report suspected child abuse. This should be commonsense and self-evident as schools have zero role or responsibility for the parenting of children. Hell, public schools only make a cursory effort to educate them. But educators, being what they are, frequently think they are better equipped to raise a child than the parents. Such was the case in Fort Worth. This is an op-ed by Texas State Senator Konni Burton:

Unfortunately, this basic democratic opportunity was recently denied to the parents and taxpayers within Fort Worth ISD, and the repercussions could be extremely serious.

Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Dr. Kent Scribner recently announced new guidelines for faculty and staff on the handling of its transgender student population. These new guidelines require the recognition of the preferred gender identity of the student, the use of the pronoun he or she prefers, accommodations for the use of bathroom and locker room facilities and participation in the physical education of their preferred gender identity. These guidelines will affect all students, not just transgender students, and to act as if they do not need public and parental input is quite alarming.

Dr. Scribner and his executive team created the new transgender student guidelines through the use of “administrative regulations,” a rule-making process that does not require action by the publicly elected Board of Trustees. Without the need for a vote by the Board, there was no organized forum for an open debate on the merits of the new policies.

Fair minds can certainly argue whether the superintendent overstepped his authority by unilaterally enacting expansive new transgender policies; however, it cannot be argued that bypassing a public debate and avoiding parental input was a wise decision. Parents, not schools, are the primary decision-makers for their children; their opinion and input is absolutely invaluable and Fort Worth ISD was remiss in not tapping into the wealth of their perspective and experience. Involving parents should be the default position for any potentially controversial new policy of an independent school district, and unfortunately in this instance, it was not.

The new guidelines make it plain that parents are on a strictly “need-to-know” basis, and that “notifying a parent or guardian carries risks for the student in some cases.” Yet, within those same guidelines, Fort Worth ISD makes it clear that they can and will share this same private information with a third party without parental consent should they decide it’s in the student’s best interest. Frankly, I’m appalled by this language, and I hope the parents whose children attend Fort Worth ISD are as well.

Our schools are a place of learning; they are not replacements for the support and love of the family. I’ve heard it argued already that leaving parents in the dark is in the interest of safety, yet research shows transgender people are at an exponentially higher risk of suicide than the general population.

Essentially what the Forth Worth school superintendent did was say that parents would not have to be notified that their child suffering from a mental disorder, that would be “gender dysphoria,” and,indeed, encouraged schools NOT to inform parents. Never mind that this rule is a direct violation of state law. Never mind that it would prevent the parents from seeking treatment for the condition and possibly damage the child for life.

It takes a village, as they say.

Just because Squirrel-Hair won the presidency doesn't mean that his slavish devotees don't have anything more to answer for. In fact, it looks like the avalanche of "stuff to answer for" is just getting started:

President-elect Donald Trump strayed far from the talking points of his campaign during his wide-ranging interview Tuesday with New York Times journalists. Trump suggested he does not necessarily need to sever ties to his businesses while president. He said he has an open mind to acting on climate change. And he even offered some praise for the Clinton Foundation.

On the business ties, Trump was vague about when he will wind them down and how. He suggested he intends to transfer ownership to his kids, but then he also noted that the president is immune from federal conflict-of-interest laws. 

Congress, you are going to have to show some actual understanding of conservative principles, consistency in applying them, and a sense of urgency about doing so.

Not sure what to make of S-H's appointment of Nikki Haley as UN ambassador (which she has accepted).  She has little foreign policy experience beyond South Carolina-related international trade issues. Maybe S-H is trying to send signals that he is broad-minded, since Haley supported Rubio during the primaries.

A German court rules that roving bands of "sharia police" that approach people on the street and tell them not to drink alcohol and listen to music are not illegal.

Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier at NRO look at the wastefulness, data-cooking and general intrusiveness of one of the most tyrannical bodies in the world: the EPA:

In one analysis by the Office of Management and Budget, of the 30 least cost-effective regulations throughout the government, the EPA had imposed no fewer than 17. For example, the agency’s restrictions on the disposal of land that contains certain wastes prevent 0.59 cancer cases per year — about three cases every five years — and avoid $20 million in property damage, at an annual cost of $194 to $219 million.

The authors also look at such EPA boondoggles as the Superfund and the Clean Power Plan, just to set the table for their reportage on the agency's latest bit of tyranny:

The most recent new EPA travesty is new rulemaking on methane emissions, which have elicited more than a dozen legal challenges. Driven more by politics than by science, they are based on dubious data and would bring the American energy revolution to a halt, devastating not only the economy but also the environment.

Last year, the EPA reported that since 2005, net methane emissions from natural-gas infrastructure had fallen 38 percent, while total methane emissions from natural gas had dropped 11 percent. This year, however, the EPA claims that methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are one-third higher than previously thought and that overall methane emissions from natural gas have dropped only 0.68 percent since 2005. What can explain such a huge turnaround? Have America’s cows been put on a diet of hummus and baked beans?

The agency says it now has better data to determine methane emissions, but this claim is highly suspect, not only because of the administration’s political objective on this issue but because of the methodology. For one thing, the EPA’s latest figures are based on older sources developed in the 1990s, which has the effect of inflating the current measurements.

The EPA has chosen to ignore that the energy sector has taken numerous steps to reduce emissions. For example, fuels and oils that have been contaminated are now filtered by producers so they can be reused to yield maximum performance with fewer emissions. Birmingham’s Alabama Power has invested in technology that produces electricity more efficiently, lowering overall emissions. Since 2000, oil and gas companies nationwide have invested roughly $90 billion in technologies designed to reduce harmful pollutants.

The EPA is now using the cooked data to justify imposing much tighter limits on methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure. For instance, other studies have found that the annual price tag to comply with these regulations could hit $800 million, and National Economic Research Associates has concluded that, by 2020, the regulations could be three times more expensive than the EPA estimate.  

We'll pay for it, of course.

Speaking of the environment and energy policy, LITD very much likes this:

The route has been approved and it’s not going to move.

Energy Transfer Partners LP Chief Executive Officer Kelcy Warren said the company will not consider rerouting its Dakota Access oil pipeline despite concerns voiced by U.S. native groups, according to an Associated Press interview published on Friday.

President Barack Obama said earlier this month that the government was examining ways to reroute the pipeline.

Energy Transfer did not immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment. Warren did tell the AP that he would like to meet with tribal leaders to ease their concerns about the project.

While all this was going on, the protests have continued to take one violent turn after another. When the largely imported protesters continued to block highways and damage construction equipment, officials took to using water cannons to disburse them and clear a path. That’s not normally a terribly worrisome tactic, but when you get soaked down in North Dakota in November and the temperature is hovering around 23 degrees, well… let’s just say it might make you reexamine your lifestyle choices a bit.

But that didn’t stop the protesters from fighting back. Things once again got out of hand, with violence erupting. This led to one woman nearly getting her arm blown off (literally) when an explosion took place behind the protesters’ blockade. (NY Daily News)

A New Yorker was hospitalized with a gruesome injury while protesting the Dakota Access pipeline on North Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation, activists say.

The woman — identified by activists as 21-year-old Sophia Wilansky — could lose her left arm after a Monday explosion behind the protest blockade near Cannon Ball tore through her winter jacket and skin, exposing bone.

The Bronx woman was airlifted nearly 400 miles to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis following the 4 a.m. incident, said Wilansky’s friend and fellow activist Vaimoana Niumeitolu.

The protesters are claiming that it was a concussion grenade launched by law enforcement which injured her, but the local sheriff claims that they weren’t using anything like that and that the protesters had been hurling “fuel canisters” at them. (Can we all say “Molotov Cocktail” here?) It’s a he said she said situation so far, but this isn’t the first time Ms. Wilansky has been on the front lines of protests. In June she was arrested while protesting a different pipeline in Vermont.

One has to wonder where she finds the time to travel to all of these far flung sites and battle the authorities and how it hasn’t impacted her day job thus far.

Give it up, you self-congratulatory little human-advancement-haters.

Rachel Dolezal celebrates her role in the infantilization of our society

You will recall her as the head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP who turned out to be white.

Now she is set to release a memoir in which she makes an assertion parallel to that of the gender-fluidity crowd: that race is an abstract construct, and therefore relative, and therefore a matter of individual declaration rather than DNA:

Dolezal claims that her preference for black culture and history makes her “transracial.” Unlike the transgender movement, however, Dolezal’s views regarding biology and race have been denied legitimacy by liberal media outlets like even Slate and Huffington Post. I suspect the reason for this double-standard is that the concept of race is considerably less complex than that of sex or gender. Nonetheless, those who defend “transgenderism,” “transracialism,” or any other variation of self-identification commit the same fallacy.

Race, like gender, is a matter of biology. What distinguishes race and gender from other forms of classification, such as socioeconomic status or taste in music, is that they are, by definition, essential and permanent traits. They don’t change according to circumstance or personal preference. And while one can debate the practicality of classifying humans in terms of race, Dolezal’s decision to “self-identify” contradicts the entire concept of race as something permanent that applies to a select group of people. 

In his work, “Visions of Order,” the late political philosopher and intellectual historian Richard Weaver notes that “it is the very nature of culture to be exclusive.” Culture — the consensus formed in community — helps humans make sense of the world and establish norms. It allows us to discern what is good and bad, beautiful or base, true or false. 

As humans, we don’t get to completely define ourselves. We are partially, yet essentially, defined by others.

For crying out loud.

I am a musician and a music historian. I count Will Marion Cook, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery and Oscar Peterson among  my heroes. I have taught university courses in African-American music. I have written a novel that celebrates the vibrancy of late-1940s America and black cultural contribution as the reason for that vibrancy.

But not for a minute do I assume that merely pretending my pigmentation is other than it is to be some kind of right.

There is a natural architecture to the created universe. We are to fit into that architecture by engaging it with awe and reverence.


Denial of it is madness.

It will be interesting to see what kind of critical reception Dolezal's tome gets. Whether venues that have some kind of track record of being sympatico to whatever degree with this we-get-to-define-ourselves nonsense demonstrate at least a modicum of sanity and call her out for her hallucinatory stance will tell us much about whether there is any hope left for the spiritual state of this nation.

The sewer of nonsense that is post-American higher education - today's edition

A student at Bernard College enumerates a few of the basic things one encounters in life that are now "triggers".

There's Pokemon GO:

 . . . Th US some people believe Pokemon GO is a racist and classist game. Not only that, but people have alleged that it’s ableist, too. So much for “it’s just a game.” (Pictured, screenshot of actual trigger warning)

The US Constitution:

I did a double take when I saw “tw: constitution” placed on a post rejoicing the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The logic is simple: the U.S. is, according to some students and professors, a tyrannical and colonialistic empire founded via the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. For students, particularly those of color, the Constitution needs a trigger warning because it could prompt thoughts of oppression, persecution, genocide, and other social ills.

Male caucasians:

Contemporary feminism deems men as oppressors and threats. And in the hierarchy of oppressors, white men sit atop the food chain. So not only do I come across trigger warnings on posts about men — what they’ve said or done — but I also saw this one: “TW: white men” — used on an article on fraternity brothers behaving badly.

Traditional gender roles:

The traditional male/female binary is oppressive, according to far-left logic. It limits women, we’re told. So, any references to gender roles can be hurtful. For example, it may be triggering to ask a female student if she wants children when she’s older, because to ask would be to play into the stereotype that women have an inherent maternal instinct, we have been warned.

Others include the police and Thanksgiving.

Don't try to have a one-on-one conversation with your Lord at Clemson:

A man was stopped by a Clemson University administrator for praying on campus, telling him and a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) activist that “this is not a designated free speech area,” and asking them to leave the area. YAF’s blog The New Guard released the video today. 

The administrator, Shawn Jones who is the assistant director for client services, also called their praying “solicitation,” and demanded that they would need to fill out paperwork to continue. Clemson receives state and federal funding, and many see these restrictions as disregarding the First Amendment to the Constitution by limiting free speech to certain zones.

Bookworm gives an eyewitness account of orientation day at an OELAC (Obscenely Expensive Liberal Arts College). It involves a "therapy dog," testimony from parents about the emotional pain of sending the student off, and a magazine distributed to all freshmen about the tedious particulars of sexual consent.

 

 

 

Internecine squabbles among the identity-politics jackboots

Spoiled-bratism is beginning to fray the fabric of the Freedom-Hater fraternity (oops, I committed a major gender-bias faux pas in the service of alliteration):

Don’t you just hate it when you invite the new folks next door to dinner so they can meet the neighbours, and then they arrive an hour late, after which they trash your cooking skills and demand better wine?

Pride Toronto knows that feeling. Members of the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), “honoured guests” at Sunday’s Pride parade, staged an unscheduled sit-in, halting the parade for 30 minutes until Pride Toronto’s executive director signed off on their demands, including assurance there will be no police float next year and affirmative action for black transgender women and indigenous people on Pride Toronto’s staff.

The demands were accompanied by the clenched-fist belligerence we now associate with BLM, and the usual identity-politics jargon about “inclusive and safe” spaces, “marginalized communities” and the like. Since Pride is amongst the most politically correct organizations on the planet, it was pretty weird to hear Alexandra Williams, BLM Toronto’s co-founder, accusing Pride Toronto of “anti-blackness.” Evidence, Ms Williams? Anyone? But precisely because Pride is so politically correct, arguing with black activists simply wasn’t on. So Pride caved almost immediately, instead of, justifiable in the circumstances, asking the police to escort Ms Williams and her extortionate friends off the premises.

This is all quite silly, of course, but, of course, it's more than that. These are the tone-setters for all of post-American society. What starts in situations such as this soon permeates academia, the media and the workplace.

How fractured do you want society to be, jackboots?

It's because of infantile dweebs like this that jihadists feel emboldened

The identity-politics jackboots are so enamored of their fantasy narrative that they have not a world to say about what actually went down at Pulse:

Three professors have blamed the Orlando mass shooting on “toxic masculinity,” “ultranationalist” discourse, and “wide availability (and fetishization) of weapons.”

Their essays, collected on Ohio State University’s Mujeres Talk blog, appeared in a post titled “Countering Hate with Knowledge, Fury, and Protest: Three Latina/o Studies Scholars Respond to Orlando Massacre.”

“To say ‘We are all Orlando,’ is to risk being thought a queer, a fag, a freak, unnatural,” wrote Mariana Ortega, a philosophy professor at John Carroll University. “It is to lose the honorable shield of hetero-love.”

Well, Professor Ortega, there is indeed a very real sense in which "we are all Orlando," but it's not in the sense in which you would have us all believe that it is.

Down is up and up is down at every level in this world

Faye Voshell at The American Thinker examines another reason besides Putin's geo-strategic designs for strained relations between Russia and post-America/ It seems that on a cultural level there's been a big switcheroo:

At the core of the continued antagonism between the West and Russia is the breathtaking shift in ideologies that have occurred in America during the Obama administration and in Russia during Putin’s ascendance to power. 

While Russia has embraced a spiritual revival that includes the re-establishment of the ancient Russian Orthodox Church and its Christian values; and while Putin is committed to Russia the nation, the Obama administration has committed itself to an anti-Christian ideology characterized by extreme aggression toward the majority Christian community and its values; and has its gaze set on a radically secularist global world order that disregards nation states.

In brief, there has been a nearly complete role reversal since the 1970s, with some leaders of the West now devoted to a radical secularism that marginalizes and excoriates the Christian majority of the United States in systematic ways once unthinkable.

For example, rejecting the Christian concept of what it means to be human beings created in the image of God, the Obama administration has committed itself to the transgender movement, which at heart represents a view of the human being so extreme as to go against observable and scientific reality. Transgenderism has devoted itself to a concept of “equality” so dangerously reductionist that it threatens the very foundations of Western civilization. 

The sexual revolution now spearheaded by transgenderism rejects the binary nature of humanity, and thus is far more radical than the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, which at least recognized the distinctions between men and women. It is at heart nihilistic and anarchical, as it jettisons reality and strikes at any and every foundation for law and order influenced by Christianity. Total destruction of everyone and everything that stands in the way of final annihilation of Western Christian foundations is the goal of the sexual revolutionaries. A brave new global order presently only vaguely imagined is then to be built on the ruins of formerly Christianized nations -- the very concept of nations being anathema to the new revolutionaries.

President Obama is wholly committed to the transgender movement.  In fact, one could term him a proselytizer in chief for the transgender cause.

What rapprochement is possible between Russia and the West while such a radical viewpoint is embraced by leaders of Western democracies?  What hope is there for diplomatic agreements between America and Russia when the current administration of the United States, and quite possibly a future administration under Hillary Clinton, is committed to a utopian world order that requires the death of nation states and the eradication of any Christian framework for law and order? Shall these radical notions be the standard for Russia, just as she is committing herself to rediscovery of her national and religious heritage?

No wonder there is talk of a new Cold War when there is such a radical ideological reversal.

She goes on to point out that there is a significant sentiment among the Russian populace to prevent the kind of nihilism with which cultural rot has infected the Western soul from taking hold there. It does have a foothold, witness the antics of the punk band Pussy Riot, but there is resistance to its further encroachment.

How ironic that the less democratic of the two world powers is the one yearning for a revival of the faith that enlivened so much of the world prior to the present age.

It's important to see Putin as a Russian first, which is why he gives the nod to his countrymen's desire for a faith-permeated society.  The Most Equal Comrade, by contrast, sees himself as a World Citizen first, and would just as soon Christian faith wither and blow away in post-America.

Clearly I'm not God, but I don't see how He can forgive post-America

If this is transpiring, there is obviously no critical mass of the post-American public that can mount an effective resistance to the insanity that now reigns:

Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies may soon face lawsuits for treating male and female patients according to their biological sex, thanks to a health care rule finalized in May as part of the Affordable Care Act.

On the same day President Barack Obama announced his controversial transgender school bathroom policy last month, a somewhat more sinister mandate was finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with consequences for health care providers, insurance companies, and American taxpayers.

The rule contains an explicit definition of gender identity that states a person can claim to be male, female, neither, both, or some combination of the two, said Roger Severino, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation.
“It’s now federal policy that you could be both male and female in some combination,” he said.  “That’s a pretty radical statement, and impossible to know what it really means.”

If a medical doctor, based on biological evidence, sees a male patient, but the patient claims to be a female, the doctor must treat the patient as a female. Failure to do so could leave the doctor vulnerable to lawsuits, lost federal funding, and federal investigation by the Office of Civil Rights, the HHS arm implementing this policy. 

The regulations provide an example of how a doctor could discriminate against a transgender patient, Severino said. If two people are both candidates for a hysterectomy, one a woman with uterine cancer and the other a woman who wants fewer woman parts to look more like a man but is otherwise perfectly healthy, the doctor could be found to be discriminating against the second woman by choosing to treat the woman with cancer instead. The rule states all the second woman would need to attempt to force the surgeon to perform an elective hysterectomy is a note from a psychologist affirming her desire to become a man, Severino said.

This essentially takes away a physician’s independent medical judgement, Severino said: “[doctors] shouldn’t be put in the position to violate their conscience or their medical judgment… Lawyers, not doctors, will decide if something is medically appropriate.”
According to HHS’ Office of Civil Rights,the rule (Section 1557) emanates from the nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs or activities. The rule claims to build on federal civil rights laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975.
The rule will take effect on July 18. A HHS summary sheet describes the rule’s intent: “The rule makes clear that sex discrimination prohibited under Section 1557 includes discrimination based on an individual’s sex; pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions; gender identity; and sex stereotyping. Individuals cannot be denied health care or health care coverage based on their sex, including their gender identity.”

One more example of why all of us must devise ways to proceed with what we're doing in this world without taking that first federal dollar. It is that thread of dependence that permits them to work their totalitarian machinations.

Resist. 

 

 

Day-after reflections

I'm exhausted.

Being a post-American in 2016 was already exhausting enough, but then along comes an event like the Pulse massacre and the ensuing free-for-all between the various factions of our fractured society. At my core there remains an unshakable conviction that there is a good, right, sensible and noble way to approach life, but it's buried beneath the cacophony of the moment and this age save for a precious microsecond here and there.

In an attempt to systematize my thoughts on the matter, I'll take the various players and examine what their significance is.

The gun-control opportunists - Are you surprised at how quickly and loudly they chimed in? Just as they have with terms such as "gender fluidity" and "climate change," they have strung together a pair of words and coined a supposed concept - the "assault rifle" - that doesn't actually exist. And, once again, the scene of the horror was a gun-free zone, so nobody in that club was in a position to take Mateen down.

The LGBT "community" - There was a time, prior to the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969, when people with unconventional notions of companionship, intimacy or just plain pleasure-seeking sought their satisfactions without declaring some kind of demographic affiliation that needed to be championed. Then those who so declared showed themselves to be leftists even before they were homosexuals, lesbians, or bisexuals. That is, the juxtaposition of their now-established identity against the larger "establishment" took on the same class-struggle trappings as all leftist causes. We now had the beleaguered minority against some supposedly consciously organized majority determined to impose its supposed bigotry in perpetuity. And then came the slippery slope of the last - well, year, really. Hasn't it been basically in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling creating a "right" to homosexual "marriage" out of whole cloth that everybody up and down the block wants to be "transgendered" and the federal Justice Department has acted to force acceptance of this, in the form of an edict about restrooms, on anybody still clinging to what was normal in, say, 2014? And, of course, because there is no doubt that the survivors of those killed at Pulse indeed deserve our sympathy, there is pressure on the remaining Christians in post-America to once again zip it. And now those exerting the pressure have an exquisite form of leverage: Keep your mouth shut re: any talk of sin, or we'll lump you in with the jihadists who throw us off rooftops in Mosul, hang us in Tehran, or shoot up our nightclub in Orlando.

The Most Equal Comrade - Of course, he showed his gun-control-opportunist colors as soon as he could, and, as has been much noted, he didn't mention radical Islam, but perhaps his most nauseating assertion was that “we need the strength and courage to change.” There's always something wrong with the populace of his own country with this guy.

Donald Trump - His initial tweet, which once again demonstrates his lack of command of rudimentary syntax and punctuation, is also a classic glimpse into the way his Grand Canyon-size ego functions. He appreciates the congratulations for his prescience, but really he's not interested in it. And resolving the West's twilight struggle with a mortal threat is reduced to a matter of being "tough and smart." One thing he was actually right about was the Most Equal Comrade's failure to acknowledge the massacre as an act of jihad, but he pointed it up in such a ham-fisted way ("he should step down") that it gives ammunition to those eager to show what a bonehead he is. Of course, the Bots will eat it up.

Hillionaire - Not much to say here. She's been predictable in her response, wanting to cover all the bases: showing solidarity with the LGBT "community," grandstanding for gun control, positioning herself to the Most Equal Comrade's right - and thereby deny Squirrel-Hair a barking point - by naming radical Islam as the perp.

The jihadists - They will incinerate the nation's major cities when they have everything in place to do so, and they will turn any of the nation's surviving women and girls into sex slaves.

As you can see, with the above players consuming nearly all the oxygen in our national conversation, there is little room for the assertion of basic truths, such as the fact that post-America is under assault from both jihadists and cultural Marxists, and that ours is a safer society the greater the number of devotees of ordered liberty who are armed.

Not to mention the most over-arching point of all: Life in this nation is going to make even less sense and be even more fatiguing and painful as we go forward, because we are a stiff-necked people utterly uninterested in turning toward almighty God.

How advanced is the rot? - today's edition

They may have appeared to be wading into the foamy sands of the water's edge, but these strange post-American beings were actually diving right off the cliff:

A professor at Santa Monica College took a group of students on an “EcoSexual Sextravaganza” trip earlier this month, during which they “married the ocean” and were encouraged to “consummate” that marriage.

Why? Well, as one of its organizers, a professor named Amber Katherine, told Campus Reform, it was to get students to love the environment more through “exocentric passion and even lust.”

Oh, right. Duh.

The leaders of the trip were UC–Santa Cruz professor Elizabeth Stephens and pornographic actress/writer/sex educator Annie Sprinkle — both of whom are “the effective leaders of the ecosexual movement,” according to a writeup on the event in the school’s student newspaper, the Corsair.

Yeah, that’s right — “ecosexual movement.” This is an actual movement, and, not wanting to be behind the fray, SMC has its own Ecosexual Club.

Its president, Diego Martinez, told The Corsair that this was actually his second marriage to the ocean:

“It was actually our second marriage so it was kind of like renewing my vows for me,” Marquez said.

The students were specifically instructed to think of this marriage as one involving sex, and encouraged to “consummate” the marriage and “make love to the water” by sticking parts of their bodies into it, according to Campus Reform.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435916/santa-monica-college-professor-leads-ecosexual-sextravaganza 

According to the Corsair, the attendees were handed plastic rings and gave their own personal vows to the sea before Sprinkle stated, “With this ring, I thee wed, and bestow upon the sea, the treasures of my mind, heart and hands.” Stephens added, “As well as our body and soul,” and Sprinkle concluded, “And with that, I now pronounce you one with the sea” — officially making all of the participants married to the sea, apparently.

And then it was back to the playpen called their campus.

An Oregon teacher who resents her DNA goes full DeBlasio

A pronoun jackboot with access to the impressionable minds of very young children cashes in big:

A “transmasculine” teacher at an Oregon elementary school has been awarded $60,000 by her school district as compensation for harassment she claims to have suffered on the job, including being referred to by the wrong pronoun.

According to The Oregonian, Leo Soell was born a woman, but now prefers to identify as “transmasculine” and “genderqueer,” meaning she does not consider herself to be male or female. After getting breast cancer in late 2014, she had her breasts amputated to create a more masculine appearance and changed her name to Leo. Once she returned from medical school in May, 2015, Soell was fully public with her gender-neutral identity.

Once she returned to work, Soell claims she fell victim to relentless harassment from her co-workers. She says employees persisted in calling her hurtful terms like “Miss Soell,” “lady,” and “she.” If a student asked Soell’s sex, she says she was ordered to reply it was a private matter not suitable for discussion at school.

Some teachers were even worse, Soell said. She claimed one teacher screamed at her in the hallway that her gender choice was offensive to God, and she said teachers conspired to use the school’s only gender-neutral bathroom so Soell would have to wait a half-hour or more to use it.

The school conducted an internal investigation after Soell complained, but found no proof of harassment.

Eventually, Soell was able to cut a deal with the school to have her referred to by her preferred pronoun, “they,” but Soell said the harassment didn’t stop, so she finally hired an attorney and prepared to file an official complaint.

Oregon is a very friendly state for individuals who claim they have suffered discrimination based on gender identity. The state’s labor commissioner, Brad Avakian, forced a bakery to pay $135,000 to a lesbian couple they wouldn’t bake a cake for, and he has also compelled a bar owner to pay a whopping $400,000 to a group of transgender customers he tried to ban from his bar.

Eager to avoid meeting a similar fate, district officials agreed to pay Soell $60,000 in compensation for her emotional distress . . .

The district is also imposing the kinds of rules for addressing others that DeBlasio is pushing in NYC.

Tuesday morning roundup

Erdogan consolidates his power in Turkey by making his cabinet unfailingly loyal to him, so that the country's parliamentary system will be just for show.

His opponents, and skeptical Western allies, fear growing authoritarianism. Prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since he became president in 2014. Opposition newspapers have been shut and journalists and academics critical of government policies sacked.

European Parliament President Martin Schulz criticized Erdogan's accumulation of power in comments published on Monday, describing it as a "breathtaking departure from European values" in a nation negotiating for membership of the EU.

"We see Turkey under Erdogan on its way to being a one-man-state," he told German newspaper Koelner Stadtanzeiger.

This doesn't mean that the climate jackboots have entirely given up their quest, but Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker dropping his demand for a decade's worth of records from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a significant win against the forces that attempt to demonize the oil industry.

Very incisive analysis of the China issue at NRO from Jerry Hendrix. He says that China probably doesn't actually want war with post-America, but that its regional strategy seems to be a response to phase three of the Joint Operations manual that has guided US thinking about conflict for about 20 years:

China’s actions are representative of a new phenomenon that is increasingly characterizing the foreign policies of authoritarian states around the world. Like states such as North Korea, Iran, and Russia, China has recognized that America is trapped by its doctrinal adherence to “phasing,” the method by which it goes to war as delineated in Joint Publication 3-0, “Joint Operations,” first published in the early 1990s. As its name suggests, the method lays out six major phases of war: phase 0 (shaping the environment), phase I (deterring the enemy), phase II (seizing the initiative), phase III (dominating the enemy), phase IV (stabilizing the environment), and phase V (enabling civil authority). It’s a step-by-step approach that has come to dominate American tactical and strategic thought.

The problem is that when you write the book on modern warfare, someone is going to read it, and those that seek to challenge the United States most certainly have. They know that U.S. war planners are all focused on phase III — the “Dominate the Enemy” phase — and treat the separation between phases as impermeable barriers. America’s concentration on phase III has allowed rising competitors to expand their influence through maneuvers that thwart U.S. interests in the preceding three phases, maneuvers cumulatively grouped in a category known as “Hybrid” warfare. Authoritarian states have mastered the art of walking right up to the border of phase III without penetrating it, slowly eroding American credibility without triggering a kinetic response.

He sees a scenario in which post-America may have to land with some kind of force on one of these artificial islands China has made, in order to assert the notion of international territory.

In the latest example of the current regime's let-them-eat-cake attitude toward the cattle-masses (following closely on the heels of the wait lines at some post-American airports so long that they resulted in hundreds of missed flights, and Jeh Johnson's response), VA Secretary Robert McDonald says that since wait times at Disney resorts are comparably long, it's nothing for anyone to get steamed about. Yeah, he actually said that.

And ICE is opening special detention centers for transgendered illegal aliens.

Thursday afternoon roundup

Just about the time you start thinking, hey, jihad hasn't been on the radar screen for a few days, you get something like this:

Flight MS804 was travelling from Paris to Cairo when it vanished from radar 10 miles into Egyptian airspace at 00.30am GMT without making a distress call. 

Greek defence minister Panos Kammenos said the Airbus A320 made 'sudden swerves' in mid-air, lurching 90 degrees to the left then 360 degrees to the right. It then dropped from 37,000 feet to 15,000ft before the signal was lost at around 10,000 feet.

The revelation came as security experts, ministers and former air accident investigators said all the evidence pointed to the plane being targeted in a terrorist attack.

Ross Kaminsky at The American Spectator lets us in on the dialogue going on in his head these day:

 Anti-Trump: I just don’t see how I can, in good conscience, vote for Donald Trump. I think I’m going back to what I’ve done for most of my adult life, voting Libertarian for president. I like Gary Johnson quite a bit.

Pro-Trump: What a waste! It’s about time you realize that Donald Trump is what the people, or at least Republicans, want because they’re so angry with business as usual, the “establishment,” and generally by a GOP that has shown so little spine standing up to the many tyrannical acts, large and small, of the Obama administration.

AT: Although I’m independent, not Republican, I share their anger and agree with the diagnosis of the cancer that our Leviathan government has become on our nation, but Trump seems more like taking cyanide than chemotherapy.

PT: Let’s not exaggerate. If you want to talk about national political suicide, that’s Hillary Clinton, especially after eight years of Barack Obama. If we get Hillary, her Supreme Court nominee(s) will wreck what’s left of the Constitution and rule of law in the United States, we’ll never get rid of Obamacare, the national debt will continue to skyrocket, and while all that is going on we’ll have to hear her condescending screeching for four or eight years. You’ll want to kill yourself if you love your country or your sanity (the latter already dubious given this conversation).

AT: The problem for me is twofold: First, I have no idea if Mr. Trump actually believes anything — it doesn’t help that he often seems to believe two contradictory things in one speech and three in one day. Therefore I don’t know what he will do except that he seems strongly against free trade and against entitlement reform, each of which represents a way of thinking potentially as economically harmful, in both the short and long term, as anything Hillary is likely to accomplish. Second, I can easily imagine a wave of Republican victories in the 2018 mid-terms if Hillary is president and then a Republican unseating her in 2020 whereas I can imagine Trump destroying the GOP, losing both houses of Congress in 2018 and then the presidency (in fact, I can imagine him not running for re-election) in 2020. And if Dems get full control of the government again, as they had in 2009-2010, they won’t repeat Obama’s mistake of focusing all of their attention on one issue (health care) and neglecting to advance the rest of their left-wing agenda. They will then truly destroy the America that you and I love.

PT: You’re overthinking this. Even if you’re right that that’s a possibility, and I’m not saying it’s impossible, what is certain is the negative impact that Hillary Clinton will have. Again, I can’t overstate the importance of the Supreme Court — and even you have to believe that Trump would nominate a far better justice than Hillary would. She would massively expand the already-smothering regulatory state. She would destroy jobs through misguided anti-fossil fuel policies and a big hike in the federal minimum wage. And although it’s harder to measure, she would continue the most egregious part of the Obama legacy: his intentional fracturing of the American people along race and “class” lines; Obama and Clinton are both disciples of Saul Alinsky, a truly evil man who hated everything that the Declaration of Independence — and therefore this nation — stands for.

AT: I don’t disagree with that, but I just don’t know if it’s enough to get me to vote for a man who is an unprincipled populist nationalist with no understanding of basic economics or foreign policy or anything else that a president needs to understand. I hate to say it, but I sort of agree with Hillary Clinton’s characterization of Trump as a “loose cannon.” 

And so on. I could identify, big-time.

A WaPo poll reveals that nine in ten Native Americans don't give a diddly if the Washington Redskins have that name.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders - or, for that matter, Hillionaire - turn your gaze toward Venezuela and see the end product of your economic agenda.

And Bill DeBlasio burnishes his bona fides as a world-class nature-distortion jackboot:

We learned this week that Hizzonor Bill de Blasio has yet another plan to entrench the city in “transgender” warfare and make sure that business owners are made to toe the line on political correctness. Under this latest scheme, any business which greets someone using a pronoun not matching the gender (or lack thereof) the customer “identifies” as could face a stiff fine in court. No… I’m not even remotely kidding you. (Washington Times)

Greeting customers as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” — or even not using the pronoun “ze” or “zir” — could prove costly for New York City businesses under rules drafted by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bureaucrats.

The Gotham mayor’s Commission on Human Rights says entities that fail to address customers by their preferred gender pronouns and titles are in violation of the law and could be subject to penalties of up to $250,000.

The commission issued a “legal enforcement guidance” for the New York City Human Rights Law, which now “requires employers and converted entities to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.”

So now New York City will regulate the speech of business owners and employees down to the level of punishing those who use standard, polite pronouns which have been accepted protocol for nearly as long as we’ve had language skills. 

"Orwellian" really no longer adequately describes it.

At NRO, Victor Davis Hanson catalogues the just-in-recent-months ways that the Most Equal Comrade has destabilized the world.

RIP Morley Safer. 

If you're into the-neighbors-are-doing-it excuses for something you're considering doing and need one to apply in the case of post-America electing a boorish thug as president, you may take comfort in the recent behavior of Canada's prime minister:

Progressive golden boy Justin Trudeau showed his authoritarian colors on Wednesday as he threw a temper tantrum in Canada's legislature, grabbing one member of Parliament and elbowing a female member in the breast. Why? Trudeau was upset that opposition MPs had taken a few moments longer than he liked to begin voting on a key piece of his legislative agenda.

Trudeau's Liberal government had made a motion to shut down debate on a bill that would allow assisted suicide in Canada. Opposition MPs on both sides of the issue claim the government bill is flawed and needs more debate and changes. When Trudeau said no, they stalled a little and that is all it took for him to fly into a fit of rage.

When Conservative and New Democrat MPs had stalled for a whole 46 seconds after the vote had been called to order, Trudeau got up from his seat, marched across the aisle and began manhandling other members of Canada's legislature.

He grabbed Conservative whip Gord Brown by the arm and in doing so the self-proclaimed feminist also elbowed New Democrat Ruth Ellen Brosseau in her breast, pushing her back into a desk. Trudeau didn't even pause to see if she was okay before marching Brown towards his seat.

He then returned to the opposition benches to yell at New Democrat members that were not moving fast enough, reportedly yelling at one point, "Get the f@*k out of my way."

Trudeau denied there was a problem before later offering an, "I'm sorry but..." apology. He left Parliament walking past reporters and smiling arrogantly while refusing to answer any questions about the incident.

Justin, dude, take a chill pill.