Category: Western Civilization
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A Matter Of Trust. And Lack Of It.
Representative government requires trust – above all, trust that everyone, king and commoner alike, is equal in the eyes of the law and “the system” – and everyone follows more or less the same rules. But we’re not doing that anymore. Marc Rich scammed people, and got pardoned for being a Democrat bigwig; Bill Clinton…
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All About The Kids
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: This guy will use any stick to beat his favorite horses so I’m not endorsing his analysis. The rise in births to unmarried mothers could be due to some other factor – unpopularity of shotgun marriages, for instance. But his claims that mixed race children grow up without fathers,…
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Lessons
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: European wacko, far-right, fringe party . . . wins 36% of the vote. The mainstream, sensible, traditional parties couldn’t scrape together enough to get into the runoff election. The media keeps using that word: “fringe.” I don’t think it means what they think it means. This election result is…
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Happy Easter. You’re Dead.
Read this piece, from MPR, about the bombings in Lahore, Pakistan. Horrific? Yep. What’s missing? The fairly pivotal fact that the the Pakistani Taliban targeted the park because it was a major center for Pakistani Christians celebrating Easter. To do so would interfere with the narrative that we’re not involved in a battle to the death with a millennarian,…
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Diasporic?
If nothing else, Europe’s Jews have learned that when your ship strikes an iceberg, you don’t wait for a future round of lifeboats: The European Jewish Congress has publicized a shocking poll: “A third of the European Jews think of emigrating”. That is 700,000 people. “The Jews of Europe are at a crossroads”, tells me Moshe Kantor, president of…
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No Rape Please; We’re European
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Remember this photo? Boko Harum, a band of Muslim terrorists, kidnapped 300 Christian girls and sold them into sexual slavery, citing as justification an interpretation of the Koran that permits sexual relations with captured infidel women. The kidnappers were not ashamed because they believed their actions were morally justified. …
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Counterintuitive
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Larry Correia writes the Monster Hunter series, which are pretty good SF. He’s also a Gun Guy, truly one of us. His column about Paris: I like this line, talking about the Obama administration failures in the Middle East: “. . . the western world was literally cheering Putin…
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A Lesson From Paris
In the Charlie Hebdo attack, Muslim terrorists slaughtered some deeply unsympathetic characters; “journalists” whose entire milieu involved whizzing in other peoples Wheaties. And they attacked a kosher market – in other words, Jews. So if you’re not a smug confrontational “journalist” or a Jew, you may have felt you were safe. And their targets in the US,…
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Doakes Sunday: The Straw
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about a rather aggressive-sounding statement from a hitherto-pacifistic churchman: But surely there is only one logical conclusion to be drawn? He sighs, and answers slowly. “You are asking me how we can deal radically with Isis. The only answer is to radically destroy them. I don’t think we can…
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Veterans Day
Our country has chosen this, the anniversary of the end of World War I, to commemorate our veterans. I’m terrible at finding words to express that kind of thanks, naturally; I took my best stab at it a couple of years ago, and I’m kind of proud of it – but seriously, how do you thank someone…
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Wages Of Charity
A couple of elderly Holocaust survivors assaulted in a genuine hate crime in the Netherlands: Samuel (87) and Diana (86) Blug, two elderly Holocaust survivors, fell victim to a vicious and violent anti-Semitic attack at their home in Holland a month ago. According to a Yedioth Ahronoth report on Sunday, the couple were only able to come forward now and…
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Imports
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: A pair of graduate students from the U of M came to the office to learn about Minnesota’s system of land title records. Seems they’re hoping to institute a new system in Kenya where land records are not reliable, making investment risky which discourages entrepreneurship and that leaves people…
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Much Ado About Ado
The left, in its tireless search for crises not to waste, is going – some of them, anyway – back to that old warhorse, the Metric System. Charles CW Cooke: Examined in a vacuum, there is nothing obviously virtuous about the imperial system of measurement. If the United States were starting from scratch, à la…
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Q: Who’s The Leader Of The Free World?
A: Not who you think.
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Signs
Even if the United States were not being led by the pusillanimous and incompetent Obama administration, it would be high time for Middle Eastern and NATO countries to start picking up some of the burden of dealing, financially and militarily, with the terrorist threat they face. And time will tell whether this story checks out,…
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Never AgainNot For A WhileRemember last summer’s stunt, where a smokin’ hot babe filmed herself walking for hours through Manhattan, and the response she got from men along the streets? A Jewish journo- member of a a minority that could teach American academic feminists a thing or two about what real oppression is – did the same thing through…
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Everything You Know About ISIS Is Probably Wrong
And me, too. This piece – “What Isis Really Wants“, by Graeme Wood, in that noted conservative tool The Atlantic – explains ISIS in political, social and theological terms better than any single thing I’ve ever read. It’s a long read, but a valuable, even vital one. The entire piece is essential, it was almost pointless to…
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Lessons
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Lawyers are required to take Continuing Legal Education. I’m thinking of giving a class on the subject of “Making Minnesota Muslim-Friendly.” The auditorium would be broken into sections marked by signs: in front, Men; behind them, Women; back row, Menstruating Women; and one small area of standing room right…
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Shelf Life
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: President Obama says Muslims are ignorant, medieval racists. Well, not in so many words. But the point of drawing a moral equivalency between Muslims, the Inquisition and slavery in the Old South is that all three examples are equally bad so we shouldn’t single out Muslims for disapproval. Agreed.…
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Happy Reagan’s Birthday!
The jelly beans are on my desk, to greet passersby. I’ve got a pot of stew in the crock pot, ready for the traditional family dinner, when I tell my kids how unlikely it is they’d have been born but for today’s birthday boy, and why. It’s time for the official Shot In The Dark…
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Regime Change
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: New York Times now says regime change is bad? US interventionism in WW II made things worse for a short time, especially in Germany. So we shouldn’t have sought to change Hitler’s regime? Washington and Jefferson were right all along about entangling alliances in European affairs? Is that what…
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Western Civilization’s Finest Hour
It was fifty years ago today that Winston Churchill died. There’s a strong case to be made that Churchill was the greatest person of the past 100 years; that without him, Western Civilization might be a very different thing today. He was a great political thinker, a great statesman, and – especially in the darkest…
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The Mountaintop
One of the great tragedies of our age is that “Oratory” is nearly a lost art. It’s an age when Barack Obama is considered a “great speaker”. But Martin Luther King was one of the great orators of modern times; to listen to his great speeches is to hear one of the summits of what…
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His Finest Prediction
Well, other than the whole “Cold War” thing… Update: not really a Churchill quote? Perhaps. Too good to fact check? Yep. Fake but accurate? Oh, hell yeah.
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Rules Of Chaos
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Everybody knows warfare has changed since David’s tribe fought Goliath’s tribe. Persians, Greeks and Romans developed large-group tactics for soldiers and ships. European nations adapted tactics to weapons (volley fire for muskets, artillery fire when machine guns made marching in rows suicidal, then rapid movement by horse, truck or…