Uvalde

 1.) I've held off on posting about it because I wanted to see what facts began to become clear after the initial round of hot takes, rumors and disjointed bits of information. 

2.) The whole school-shooting phenomenon is a symptom of a root malady. I don't know that I have anything all that original to say about that. Bari Weiss sums it up effectively at her Substack, as does the editorial team at Commentary in its daily podcast for Wednesday, as does Dennis Sanders this morning at Ordinary Times. 

The way I would articulate the crisis is this: Nothing binds us together as a society anymore. Not institutional religion, not our identity politics-driven educational system. We have no agreed upon standards for what makes for great literature, music or visual art. We're obliterating the basic architecture of the universe, particularly human sexuality. Consequently, we believe in nothing outside ourselves. That leads to narcissism and nihilism, which can lead to the "I'm-gonna-get-me-a-gun-and-gout-out-and-make-a-STATEMENT!" mindset.

3.) Biden's remarks were abysmally tone deaf and divisive. "Stand up to the gun lobby"? Seriously?

4.) That said, I commend the prudence of the politicians who are stepping away from speaking spots at the NRA convention. The timing and optics are not good.

5.) Beto O'Rourke was rightly put in his place. He acted like a supreme jerk.

6.) The Uvalde police department seems to be supremely incompetent, as evidenced by the train-wreck press conference at which reporters couldn't get answers to some pretty direct questions. 

Gun control: an example of the Left's histrionics being all out of proportion to its policy-making influence

Worthwhile Josh Kraushaar piece at the National Journal today on why gun control isn't going to get off the ground this time, just like it never does.

He looks at the way Democrat political figures from red state or swing states have conducted themselves since the Las Vegas massacre:

Six red-state Senate Democrats representing largely rural states are up for reelection in 2018, and not one came out for more gun control in the wake of the Vegas killings. West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who cosponsored bipartisan legislation expanding the scope of background checks, has been notably quiet. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota voted against the background-check bill, and has no interest in bringing up gun control in the run-up to her reelection campaign. Sen. Claire McCaskill, the most liberal of the bunch, simply released an anodyne statement calling the Vegas attack “evil” and offering support for law enforcement. She knows the politics in Missouri better than the armchair pundits who insist that gun control is a slam-dunk issue.

Even in traumatized Nevada, a swing state where Democrats have been gaining ground, it’s tricky to talk about stricter gun control. The state has an above-average gun-ownership rate, and guns go hand-in-hand with the Wild West feel of its desert regions. Gov. Brian Sandoval, one of the most popular GOP governors in the country, recently vetoed legislation mandating additional background checks, while signing bills that offer additional protections for gun owners. 

Jacky Rosen, the highly-touted Democratic congresswoman from Las Vegas running against Sen. Dean Heller, didn’t talk about gun control after the tragedy. Rosen spokeswoman Ivana Brancaccio said the congresswoman supports some action to deal with gun violence but didn’t specify any details. “No single policy change could prevent a mass shooting like this, but Congresswoman Rosen is committed to action that addresses the unacceptable rate of gun violence in this country and will help ensure fewer weapons designed to kill people end up in the hands of dangerous individuals,” Brancaccio said.

Kraushaar speculates on some possible reasons for this, including the fact that overall gun violence is down "markedly" since the mid-1990s. Then he steps back and looks at the national perspective:

National polls further explain the Democrats’ reticence: 48 percent of Americans said they had a gun in their household, according to an August NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey—the highest total since the pollster began asking that question in 1999. A 50 percent majority in the same poll said they worry that government will go too far in restricting the rights of citizens to own guns, versus 45 percent who think the government should do more to regulate guns. Two national polls conducted in 2016 (NBC/WSJ and Quinnipiac) found the NRA with net-positive favorability scores, despite the barrage of negative publicity. This is far from a slam-dunk political issue, despite what some talk-show hosts believe.

So it would seem to be a lot of sound and fury signifying not a whole lot.

Oh, and consider the change in viewpoint of a statistician who participated in an extensive study for FiveThirtyEight on the 33,000 annual gun homicides in the US. She went into it with preconceived notions of a pro-gun-control nature, but the facts that she amassed changed her mind.

At first glance it may seem distasteful to bring politics into the Harvey situation, but it's there

Streiff at Red State points out the difference between Governor Abbott's warning and Houston mayor Sylvester Turner's, um, advice. On Friday, Abbott told Texans, "Even if an evacuation order hasn't been issued by your local official, if you're in an area between Corpus Christi and Houston, you strongly need to consider evacuating."

Then the mayor started sending out tweets about repositioning furniture, the Mayweather-McGregor fight, and a little break in the rain after 3 inches.

Streiff gets uncomfortably real at this point:

There is no nice way of putting this. Houston in a Democrat stronghold and the urge to make Greg Abbott look like an idiot was just too big of a temptation to resist. Perhaps the fiasco of the Hurricane Rita evacuation caused the leadership in Houston to miscalculate. Even so, there was no defensible reason for the mayor and his minion to go public and contradict some very sound advice and put lives at risk, both of citizens who did not evacuate and of first responders who will be called upon to try and rescue them. There were all sorts of options available to the Houston mayor short of pooh-poohing the imminent arrival of a major storm. For instance, he could have agreed with Abbott and emphasized that there was no evacuation order or he could have ordered the mandatory evacuation of areas that were known to be vulnerable to flooding.

Will there be consequences for this? Probably not. Democrats don’t vote Democrats out of office for corruption and incompetence. Take a look at any major US city you wish if you desire evidence.

What is predictable is that by Tuesday, the Houston mayor will be slamming state and federal response to the disaster and no one in the media is going to look twice at how the catastrophe happened.

Just putting this out there as something that will bring clarity to all the after-the-fact discussion.

The West acquiesces to its own conquest - today's edition

Heather MacDonald has a piece at City Journal on the pathetic lengths European feminists are going to in order to obscure the plain truth about who has been behind the massive statistical uptick in rapes and molestations:

 Silence was justified on the grounds that acknowledging the attacks would encourage opposition to the mass Muslim immigration that had engulfed Europe over the previous year. (German chancellor Angela Merkel accelerated that migration by declaring in August 2015 that her country would accept all Syrian asylum-seekers who made it in to her country.) Feminists were “finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees,” explained British journalist Jessica Abrahams. When feminists were cornered into addressing the violence, they tied themselves into knots trying to change the subject back to their favorite topic: Western white-male patriarchy. “The problem of sexualized violence has already existed here for some time and can’t simply be Ωdeported,≈ ” said German feminist Anne Wizorek to Der Spiegel. “It cannot be allowed to become the standard in gender debates that only male migrants are considered to be those responsible [for sexual violence].” In other words, the New Year’s assaults were continuous with the routine terror inflicted by German men on German women.

Actually, there was no precedent in Germany or the rest of Europe for mass peacetime sexual assaults, much less ones where the police merely look on. “I have never experienced such a thing in any German city,” a victim told the New York Times. But people who did name the attacks for what they were—a manifestation of Muslim misogyny and an alarm bell regarding mass immigration—were vilified as racists. An old-school German feminist, Alice Schwarzer, denounced the New Year’s assaults as a “gang bang” designed to terrorize women; she found herself condemned by other feminists and “antiracists.” Victims refused to give their names to reporters for fear of being pilloried on social media for xenophobia. Specious moral equivalencies poured forth: not only were the attacks a mere subset of everyday Western antifemale violence, but also ordinary citizens connecting those attacks to the out-of-control migrant situation were no different from the attackers themselves. Ralf Jäger, minister of the interior for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, announced: “What happens on right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.”

The most dazzling eruption of moral blindness came from a British feminist currently on a fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The political and press silence after the New Year’s attacks was a product of Western sexism and indifference to rape, alleged Laurie Penny in The New Statesman. This was, of course, preposterous. Had thousands of white males committed the attacks, a worldwide furor would have immediately broken out. The effort to look the other way was patently the result of cringing political correctness. But Penny was equally critical of the “right-wing press” for condemning the mass violence, since it only did so out of “unbridled racism.” “It’d be great if we could take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators,” she wrote. Penny did not provide any examples of daily mass sexual assaults committed by Westerners. Then, in a paroxysm of hysteria induced by the conflicting pressures of feminism and multicultural relativism, Penny accused those “right-wing” critics of not just racism but sexual perversion: “I’ll be blunt. I think some people out there are very excited by their conception of ΩIslamic≈ violence against women. It allows them to enjoy the spectacle of women being brutalized and savaged whilst convincing themselves that it’s only foreign, savage men who do these things.” This is lunatic fantasy. Moreover, the “conception of ΩIslamic≈ violence against women” is not just some “right-wing” construct—it is a fact.

The feminist apologists did issue grudging, boilerplate repudiations of the violence but only en route to conflating it with Western patriarchy. In an understatement of colossal proportions, Penny acknowledged that the “experience of women in the West is [not] exactly the same as the experience of women in Middle Eastern dictatorships and war zones.” Let’s rephrase that, shall we? To live in a society where women’s magazines, pop culture, and advertising incessantly celebrate female sexuality and promiscuity, where every elite profession desperately seeks to hire and promote as many women as it can, and where women enjoy every freedom and right that men do, is not just “not exactly the same” as living in a culture where female rape victims are murdered to preserve their family’s honor and where women who don’t wear the veil or burka face public shaming or worse; there is no similarity whatsoever between those two experiences.

To acknowledge the abyss that separates the experience of Western women from those in Arab and North African countries, though, would risk walking down a slippery slope that might end up with the recognition that Western women do not, in fact, live in a “rape culture.” But even more dangerous than such a debunking of feminist propaganda would be the possibility of confronting the potential threat that large-scale Muslim and Third World immigration poses for Western liberalism and individualism. TheNew York Times provided a stunning example of the inevitable “defining sexism down” that will be necessary to accommodate such immigration. The problem on New Year’s Eve, it reported, was that migrants from war-torn countries were “unfamiliar with German culture.” Translation: the norm that you don’t jam your fingers up women’s vaginas in public is just a quaint German custom, akin to wearing lederhosen. This, from a paper that routinely covers phony college rape allegations with outraged alarm. Making matters worse in Cologne, according to the Times, the police were working from “outdated expectations.” Had the police been up to date, they would have planned for mass sexual assaults. “This was new terrain for all,” the Times concluded.

But it won’t be “new terrain” for long. A public pool in the Bavarian town of Bornheim posted cartoon warnings against the fondling of women’s bikini-clad bottoms, before banning male asylum seekers entirely in January 2016, due to the rash of harassment complaints. Women in Berlin report being called “slut” on the street. As for gay rights, try staging a gay pride parade in one of Europe’s Muslim enclaves, and see how far you get.

And don't expect the Muslim immigrants themselves to be forthcoming with information about jihadist machinations in their midst:

TWO thirds of British Muslims would not inform the police if they thought that somebody close to them had become involved with terrorist sympathisers, according to a poll. 

This alarming revelation suggests that more than 100,000 British Muslims could sympathise with suicide bombers and people who commit terrorist acts.

The investigation is further proof that the Government’s counter-terrorism programme, Prevent, is not providing intelligence to the police from Muslim groups. 

Former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, described this revelation as “astonishing” and “troubling”. 

I guess we should expect the head of a "human rights commission" to be "astonished" by this.

But it's what you get when there's no assimilation going on:

British Muslims are becoming a nation within a nation, the former equalities watchdog has warned.

Commenting on a ground-breaking survey, Trevor Phillips said on Monday that we are “in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims”.

Calling for a new, tougher approach to integration and the abandonment of “the failed policy of multiculturalism”, he points to the survey’s “one truly terrifying finding”, that “Muslims who have separatist views about how they want to live in Britainare far more likely to support terrorism than those who do not”.ritish Muslims are becoming a nation within a nation, the former equalities watchdog has warned.

Commenting on a ground-breaking survey, Trevor Phillips said on Monday that we are “in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims”.

This is what you get when you're ambivalent about the great civilization that spawned you.

 

In NYC, de Blasio causes the rawest of feelings between City Hall and the police department

He of the 1980s solidarity junkets to Sandinista Nicaragua and the 1991 honeymoon in Cuba, has managed to alienate pretty much the entire NYPD:

The city is in turmoil over the Staten Island case and the mayor throws gasoline on the fire by painting the entire police force as a bunch of white racist brutes. Has he no shame?

He certainly has no facts. In addition to the not-so-minor detail that the police force is now an impressive mix of races and ethnic groups, crime statistics leave no doubt that any harm to befall Dante de Blasio likely would come from another nonwhite, non-cop male. Those stats show that, year in, year out, about 90 percent of homicides involve a nonwhite man killing another nonwhite man.

That is the most compelling fact of murder, yet it’s the one de Blasio and his fellow travelers on the loony left never mention. To do so would require them to acknowledge the disproportionate levels of hideous violence that continue to ravage innocent people in black and Latino neighborhoods.

The mayor and his ilk don’t have the courage to confront that heartbreaking crisis, so they take the easy and ideologically convenient course of attacking cops, as though they committed the 330 murders in the city last year.

“We need a mayor to stand up with and for us,” police- union head Pat Lynch said yesterday. He said his members feel as if de Blasio is “throwing them under the bus.”

That’s exactly what he’s doing, but the cops have plenty of company under the wheels. For in trashing them, de Blasio abandons any pretext that he is the mayor of all New Yorkers. He has sliced and diced the city, and decided that he will represent only the small piece that voted for him. Everybody else can take a hike, or get under the bus.

That includes anyone who trusts the cops and who recognizes with gratitude the man-made miracle the NYPD has achieved over the last 20 years. If you are one of those people, you are now a political orphan, without representation in City Hall.

Pick a target, personalize it, attack it.  Balkanize the populace.  Post-America's largest city is ruled over by a revolutionary socialist.

Klain's skill that is important to the regime

Great Andrew McCarthy article at NRO today on Ebola czar (he who has missed the White House strategy meet ins on that issue so far) Ron Klain and his role in the Solyndra debacle. M

McCarthy recounts how Solyndra's ride on the gravy train got going.  The beginning of the story is further proof that W was no conservative:

Solyndra was a solar-energy company backed by the family foundation of George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil magnate and major Obama fundraiser. Prior to Obama’s coming to power, Solyndra had sought government funding under the economically absurd 2005 Energy Policy Act. That law lets the government play venture capitalist, investing taxpayer money in private “green energy” boondoggles that cannot attract adequate market financing.

Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s zeal to hop on this politically correct bandwagon, it declined Solyndra’s application. As one private analyst later put it, the company was “an absolute complete disaster,” with operating expenses, including supply costs, nearly doubling its revenue — and that’s without factoring in high capital and other costs in an industry with low profit margins. Given that solar-panel competitors backed by China were producing energy at drastically lower prices, the chance that Solyndra would ever become profitable was practically nonexistent.

Then the Most Equal Comrade was elected president and the "company's" backers geared up to re-apply.

Company officers and investors reportedly visited the White House no fewer than 20 times while the loan guarantee was being considered and, later, revised. In short order, Obama made Solyndra the very first recipient of a public loan guarantee when the Energy Act program was beefed up with “stimulus” spending. The loans and credits eventually amounted to a staggering $535 million.

At the time, Ron Klain was chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden. Hot to become the face of Obama-administration green initiatives, Biden planned to announce the Solyndra loan during a much-publicized September 2009 energy speech. Officials at DOE and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had major qualms: They realized that the company was hemorrhaging money; even with the loan, Solyndra would lack the necessary working capital to turn that equation around. Yet the loan was approved in time for Biden’s speech. A rueful OMB official lamented in an e-mail that the timing of the loan approval was driven by the politics of the announcement “rather than the other way around.”

Although Solyndra was a private company, it was using its government loans as a springboard to go public. That triggered the obligation to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. For an initial public offering of stock, SEC rules require the disclosure of a company’s financial condition.

In Solyndra’s case, outside auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) foundthat condition to be dire. “The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception, and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” the PWC accountants concluded. Even with the gigantic loan, Solyndra was such a basket case that PWC found “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

Even the new post-American regime, upon examination of the "company's" dismal numbers, was disinclined to ladle the largess.  Klain then stepped up to champion the "company's" cause.

The administration was not only aware; it was worried. As ABC reports, just two days before Obama’s speech, his eminence grise, Valerie Jarrett, was warned by California businessman Steve Westly that visiting the company might “haunt [the president] in the next 18 months if Solyndra hits the wall and files for bankruptcy, etc.” Alarmed, Ms. Jarrett reached out to Mr. Klain, admonishing that “we clearly need to make sure that they are stable and solid.”

Klain, in turn, consulted with DOE before downplaying Solyndra’s problems in reporting back to Jarrett:

Sounds like there are some risk factors here — but that’s true of any innovative company that POTUS would visit. It looks OK to me, but if you feel otherwise, let me know.

Jarrett said she would rely on Klain’s assessment, notwithstanding that it conceded the very real possibility, if not likelihood, of catastrophe. As Klain elaborated in a follow-up e-mail to Jarrett:

The reality is that if POTUS visited 10 such places over the next 10 months, probably a few would be belly-up by election day 2012 — but that to me is the reality of saying that we want to help promote cutting edge, new economy industries.

I can hear him now: Ebola? There may be some risk factors, but hey, we’ll be promoting cutting-edge treatments . . . 

Now, you tell me what the rationale was behind making this guy Ebola czar.

The Most Equal Comrade is serious - not about Ebola, but about surrounding himself with loyal junta members

Is there another explanation for appointing Ron Klain as ebola czar?

As Chief of Staff for Vice President Joe Biden, Klain was largely responsible for bringing then-TIME reporter Jay Carney to the White House as the Press Secretary for Biden. Carney moved to the Obama administration after Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stepped down in 2011.

"Jay is very candid and direct. And the president likes people who are straight with him and don't create drama," Klain said glowingly after Carney was hired.

“Proud to have been the person who hired @PressSec to come to the WH. He did a fantastic job for @VP and @BarackObama!” he tweeted after Carney announced his retirement earlier this year. “Well done!”

Carney returned the favor after it was announced that Klain would be appointed by Obama.

“He has one of the quickest minds in Washington. And he’s unrelenting in his focus. When I worked with him in VP Biden’s office, he was very effective — he expected a lot from the staff but was also enormously helpful as a manager,” Carney said in an interview with Buzzfeed. “I don’t think there’s anyone I’ve learned more from, about more things, in less time.”

As Biden’s chief of staff, he helped the Vice President negotiate the stimulus legislation, wrangling Republican votes in the Senate. He was also involved with the political aspects of the green energy grants.

He also coordinated Biden’s response to the stimulus after Obama famously appointed the Vice President “Sheriff Joe” to combat reports of waste.

Klain stepped down from his position with Biden, in 2011, to become the president of Case Holdings, but he still maintained a relationship with the Obama administration.

During the 2012 election, Klain helped Obama prepare for debates with Mitt Romney, as he already had a history of preparing former Vice President Al Gore and 2004 Democratic nominee for president John Kerry.

As the chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore, Klain was deeply involved in the political battle of the 2000 election recount in Florida, remaining profoundly upset about the conclusion of that fight.

A damn apparatchik.  This is the Rahm Emanuel maxim about not letting a crisis go to waste being played out quite blatantly.  Carpe diem!  There's power to be consolidated!

UPDATE: This will be real helpful:  Klain will report to Susan Rice.

Dr. Francis Collins is full of ka-ka

Agenda much?

The National Institutes of Health director claims that Pub-driven budget cuts are to blame for the spread of ebola.

One problem:  House Pubs appropriated more for the NIH in fiscal 2014 than the Most Equal Comrade asked for.

The Ebola post

I sometimes fail to chime in at all on public-health scares.  After all, neither swine flu nor SARS, nor AIDS before them, has wiped out vast swaths of the population or anything close to it.

But this Ebola business seems to be making a rather rapid impact in areas where it hadn't been seen before - such as the United States.

Missouri physician Gil Mobley is either a conspiracy theorist or the canary in the coal mine:

He insists the CDC is underplaying the threat posed by the disease and is intentionally misleading the public.

“They said the chance of importing a cluster — just two weeks ago — was extremely small, yet we knew that it was a sure thing. And the very same day that the President echoed [Director Tom] Frieden’s sentiment at the CDC that it’s very small, that very same day, they made the misdiagnoses in Dallas and sent this infectious guy home to infect these other people.”

He's sure it's going to spread throughout the United States, speaking of a "threshold where we will outstretch the resources" for being able to deal with it.

Folks in Europe are singing a similar tune:

Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, said that ministers had been shocked by a prediction from the US public health institute that 1.4 million people may be infected by the virus by January if it continues unchecked.

As ministers, diplomats and humanitarian organisations from 20 different countries pledged a further £79 million to control the outbreak, which has already killed more than 3,000 people, a group of 35 European security officials issued a joint declaration suggesting that Ebola should be treated in the same way as the threat posed by nuclear weapons.

If it's really this dire, it comes at a doubly inopportune time, given what vice-president Biden said in an address that was probably more candid than he'd set out to give.  Or maybe he's really taken in the magnitude of the moment.  Could be why his hair is so white.  He spoke of "wolves at the door" and the post-World War II international order "literally fraying at the seams," a scenario being played out in a number of disturbing ways:

This has all led to a number of immediate crises that demand our attention from ISIL to Ebola to Ukraine -- just to name a few that are on our front door -- as someone said to me earlier this week, the wolves closest to the door. 

There, of course, arises a question that one hesitates to entertain even for a moment.  You know the one I'm talking about.  Okay, let's go ahead and articulate it:  How long until somebody weaponizes it?

Once again, we're forced to squarely face the fact that this is a world governed by a human nature that hasn't changed in 10,000 years, and, now that Western civilization appears to be past its peak, where is the bulwark against human nature's capacity for cruelty?

Then factor in a Department of Homeland Security and a Secret Service both of which suffer from low morale among staff and organizational dysfunction.  How's the morale in the Department of Defense?  The CIA?  The FBI?

It's crunch time, people.  As jocular old Uncle Joe says, it's fraying at the seams.

Really let in the full implication of the word "disaster"; that's what we have at the southern "border"

Former Border Patrol deputy chief Ronald Colburn depicts it this way:

“We’re back to a pre-9/11 situation basically, and this administration did that in the past five years,” he says. “All of the good that was done after 9/11 up to now has been reversed singlehandedly.”

Memo to the Freedom-Haters:  There's nothing cute about any of it anymore.   Knock it off.  You're going to get us all killed.

You definitely file this one under "WTF?"

Illegal aliens are being permitted to travel on commercial airline flights with no documentation besides a Notice to Appear form.  No ID necessary.

This is insane.

Stage Four Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

What the hell is the RNC doing sending out a damn Kwanzaa message?

Looks like this one did have an ideological angle

Sociologists, historians and cultural observers will be busy for years examining the underlying reasons for the rise in occurrences of public places getting shot up in the past few years.  Of course, the unhinged left has rushed forward after each one with shrill pronouncements of a "climate of hate" supposedly fostered by right-of-center opinion outlets.  And, of course, they've been proven wrong, every time.

This afternoon's mayhem at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. appears to actually have an ideological angle, but it would be the reverse of the one the Left tried to get us to buy before.  Obviously, we need to know a lot more details, but it seems the gunman shouted something about the FRC having hateful policies before he let loose.

It's been rough in the most literal sense of the word, let alone in more figurative ways

I guess you wouldn't come to a blog called Late in the Day looking for hefty doses of sunshine. Frankly, besides hardcore statists, who have the momentum of the tide of events on their side, do you know anyone who is, here in late December 2011, sashaying through his daily life on a gust of everything-is-going-to-be-dandy-ism? If so, do him or her the kindness of passing along the phone number of a competent therapist.

There are several levels on which we can mark the steady, continued deterioration of Western civilization throughout 2011, and most of them are regularly monitored by specialists in those areas. For the cultural rot that continues unabated, there is Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center. For the hair-raising level of indebtedness and profligate government spending which assures a future worse than that of Greece, there is Mark Steyn and Mike Shedlock. For the advanced stage of the encroachment of sharia and jihad, there's Andrew McCarthy and Pam Geller. For the continued astronomically costly obsession among far too many in our society with the non-existent trouble that "the planet" is in, there is Climate Depot.

What is left that LITD might focus on and in the course of so doing offer some kind of fresh insight?

For all the above aspects of our current juncture, I'd say that a clear sociocultural theme that emerges when one surveys 2011 is a plain breakdown in basic public order.

There was the rash of fast-food-restaurant beat-downs early in the year. There was the near-riot at an Alabama amusement park in June over a reduced-admission promotion. There were the flash-mob robberies of convenience stores. There was the Independence Day riot at a Peoria housing project when some residents decided to put on a large-scale fireworks display and when police moved in to to tell them to knock it off, got the fireworks turned on them. There was the clearly-racially-motivated riot at the Wisconsin State Fair, There was the unrest outside a George Clinton concert in Cleveland. More recently, there was the melee at Minnesota's Mall of America when rumors of Lil Wayne's presence spread throughout a crowd of hooligans.

And that's just the outbreaks of a general kind (although, as I say, some of these situations did indeed have racial overtones).

There were also labor-union conflagrations. The most noteworthy of these was the sit-in at the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison by teacher-union activists that went on for weeks. What a fine example these erudite educators were setting for their young charges by screaming for government largesse that, as Governor Walker tried to explain pretty much every day, simply wasn't there, due to the state's deficit, camping out in the capitol rotunda, and getting forged doctor slips. There was also the shutdown of the Longview, Washington shipping port in September by longshoremen's union thugs.
If one wants to expand the examination of this phenomenon to the West in general, the riots in Athens and London provide ample material.

Then, of course, there is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which brings together a number of elements present in much of the year's mayhem: spoiled white college kids (ironically, there was very little participation by blacks or other ethnic minorities), the dreadlock-tie-dye-bong-and-drum-circle crowd looking for a party, determined socialist operatives who were orchestrating matters behind the scenes, Jew-hating jihadists, and garden-variety drifters who were mainly looking for free meals and girls to molest.

Look back over all the above-enumerated developments (including the ones for which I've included specialists' links) and then ask yourself if the slip in our level of civilization is a mere hiccup - an unfortunate but momentary lowering of our expectations of ourselves as citizens of an advanced society. Is that what it really looks like to you? Or is the re-attainment of the heights we achieved in the middle of the last century less than likely?

I'm not without at least a faint glimmer of optimism. That residual reserve is not based on any evidence that would justify it. It's just that a human being without any hope that some solution to a dilemma he's facing would shut down and collapse in a heap of inertia. Not me. Apparently I'm not there yet, because I can readily say there is a lot of stuff I want to accomplish in 2012.

That said, I'm not operating under any illusions. I - and everyone else with intentions, ambitions, goals and dreams - will be conducting my affairs in an atmosphere best described as accelerated entropy in the year ahead.

I can tell you what it is

What's behind the Black Friday mayhem this year? The same breakdown in public order we've seen in the flash mob robberies, Occupy Wall Street occurences, state-capital stormings by public-sector union thugs, and the general filth that passes for entertainment these days. We're clearly a less civilized society than we were 50 years ago.

A trend emerges

Clearly racially motivated mob violence - not in some gritty urban setting, mind you, but at the Wisconsin State Fair.

I'm not sure how one would go about setting up definitions of specific types of incidents or assaults so as to get a statistical handle on the matter, but this has definitely been a year for random spontaneous outbursts of mass barbarity. There was the recent trouble outside the Cleveland venue where George Clinton and Parliament - Funkadelic were headlining a "unity concert."  There was the July situation in Peoria in which some yay-hoos were setting off fireworks in a housing project.  When the police moved in to see what the hell was going on, the perps turned the fireworks on the cops.  Over Independence Day weekend, there were four separate shooting incidents in downtown Indianapolis, one near the upscale and traditionally serene Canal Walk.  Milwaukee saw a spate of looting and fighting around this time.  Chicago has been plagued with public-transportation train cars being set upon by gangs.  There was the May shutting down of a northern Alabama water park due to mass fights among teenagers - mostly girls.  There have been several high-profile beatings in fast-food restaurants around the nation.

Most of these instances had a racial angle to them, but I'll tell you what, I'm going to address this in a colorblind fashion.  There is no doubt an ample supply of activists - community organizers and other such bottom-feeding scum - that would tell me it's impossible to do so.  I beg to differ.  Any kind of racial implication is merely an excuse to try to impart meaning where there is none.

What the sum total of these occurrences indicate is a palpable breakdown of general public order.

None of the matters I've written about since the launch of LITD (or elsewhere, such as my newspaper column, my occasional pieces for other sites, or my old blog, Bent Notes) are occurring in a vacuum.  The utter denial of what is really going on economically in this country and Europe, the cultural rot that has taken over television and popular music, the class envy and America-hatred foisted on generations of college students (and, indeed, high school students) over the past four decades, and such evidence of the deterioration of decorum and civility as the increasing prevalence of litter and road rage, are all of a piece.

You can't fray the fabric of civilization without a general anxiety permeating society as a result.  People don't feel okay anymore, for myriad reasons.

When I teach rock and roll history at our local community college, about the third week into the semester, I post trailers for 1950s turbulent-youth movies - The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, High School Confidential, Cry Baby Killer - at the site for the course.  It's clear, when one takes them all in in one sitting, that the Hollywood suits had found the perfect marketing ploy for this influx of adolescents with unprecedented spending cash in their pockets: cinematic congratulation of their distinctness as a generation, the complextity and barely contained animal innocence of their furious and frightened souls.  And the popular-culture machine has been telling every generation of teenagers (a word that only entered our lexicon in the early 1940s) since how special it was, and how its stormy cauldron of pent-up feelings needed to be catered to and understood, how it really had more to teach the tradition-steeped elders than vice-versa.

Not only is this how we do entertainment now; it's also how we do politics, witness the freely spewed infglammatory rhetoric such as the labeling of the Tea party movement as a force of terrorism by no less a luminary than the vice president, or the drawn-out camp-out on the floor of the rotunda of the (once again) Wisconsin capital by union thugs screaming for their goodies even when they and everybody else knew the state was running a budget deficit.

As I write, the stock market roller-coasters over and under the positive line as traders madly try to get a split-second sense of what to do with investment dollars before the closing bell rings in the weekend.  There is no long-term take on anything.

My father - he of the belief that table manners and proper grammar were sacrosanct -used to do his best to impress upon me the fragile nature of Western civilization, how, for all the stone edifices that housed its hallowed institutions, it ultimately hangs by a gossamer thread.

The thread is stretched as thin as it will go.  An orderly life that makes sense is not guaranteed - for your offspring in two decades, or for you and me next month.

It's late in the day.