Monthly Archives: September 2015

We who live in anglosphere North America — that is, the United States and Canada, and not Mexico — are the fortunate recipients of the world’s most valuable inheritance.  This legacy has been granted due to works noble and low, efforts voluntary and coerced, by intent and by accident, and through the interplay of our anglosphere heritage with other cultures.  Let’s face it — western civilization rocks, it kicks ass, and in the past it has kicked several asses, not all of the fairly or rightfully.

It should not be controversial to acknowledge that much of the foundation of our society was extracted from slave labor of an explicit or an insidious type. In this, it should also be simple to say that anglosphere western civilization is not alone, and not … Continue reading →

On a scale of one to ten for meaningful questions, this one goes to eleven.  What will replace the current order?  And by order, I mean the relationship of man to institutions.  A citizen to his government, and a people to another.  The one thing we know for sure is that the familiar system will no longer exist.  There are plenty of wreckers and ruiners insisting on change because they detest the current system of systems, and at any rate, things have a way of changing even when they are supposed to stay the same.

The current international order is less than one-hundred years old.  It will be instructive to see if the centenaries of WWI events bring about meaningful introspection amid all the retrospectives.  We are the … Continue reading →

People like to say that Reagan beat the democrat-media complex by going “over their heads” straight to the American people.  Well that doesn’t mean just stepping in front of a microphone and holding forth.  Any fool can do that.  McConnell and Boehner are made of microphones and they never seem to get over anybody’s head.

A conservative must reject the progressive premises in order to be heard, or else he just sounds like them, and is beholden to them for meaning, and for reach.  If you accept what the progressives say, for instance that Latinos are going to vote democrat unless you beat democrats to the punch with amnesty, then all of your subsequent arguments are just progressivism in disguise.  You have to take the conservative approach of … Continue reading →

The recent case of the student who brought a fake bomb to school is an obvious PR stunt. From the incongruous and obviously coached statements he makes to the confluence of his father’s political agitation and the nature of his own sudden fame, this is a set-up. “If you see something, say something.” Unless it’s coming from the only demographic proven to be a current concern in the Global War on Terror, which the Department of Defense now calls an “Overseas Contingency Operation”.

Judging by the Obama administration’s cooing over this provocation and the stink0eye applied to law enforcement and school officials, the new rule is “If you see something, say nothing”. Insert appropriate Soviet agitprop here. Like Obama’s race-baiting presidency itself, this case is designed to offer … Continue reading →

[brought back from the archives at ctlaw’s “request.”]
I dare say we’ve reached peak Trump.  He will continue to be a factor, but will no longer dominate.  I think within two weeks he’ll be contesting second place.

I adore Croatia.  I have a good friend there, and he never shuts up about how beautiful it is there.  Cro Cop is my favorite MMA guy.  My smallest pistol is a Croatian-made Springfield Arms imported XD-S 9 (3.3) and I adore it, too.

One of my favorite stories about Croatia, related to me by my friend Marko, concerns the butt of many Croatian jokes, the country of Slovenia.  Slovenia shares a border with Croatia.  Slovenia is regarded as backward by Croatians, a small country abhorred by other small countries as a kind of tawdry Exit 93 before you get to wherever you’re going.

Marko said that some time ago, tensions between Slovenia and Croatia were high, perhaps concerning NATO membership, EU / Euro concerns, who knows?  The Slovenian military … Continue reading →

I chopped up some numbers and rolled them into a graph.  As the numbers themselvesa re not actually important, I have left them off the graph.  Why?  One set of numbers has been churned to accentuate differences, so the actual value does not answer an intelligent question.  It is only meaningful in relation to the rest of the numbers, and we can see that relaton on the graph.  Hence no numbers.  The other set is simple enough, but is presented log-log, which again accentuates differences, etc.

The vertical scale of the graph is literally the most recent RCP average, but presented … Continue reading →

I ran some numbers on the whole Real Clear Politics Republican Nominee 2016 dataset.  This chart shows how much one candidate’s number move in accordance with each other candidates.  Technically, it shows each answer twice, but that makes it possible to read each of the left-to-right, instead of some triangle arrangement.

The unlabeled column on the right is the sum of all the numbers in that row.  That makes it an indicator of how much a candidate’s movements tend to align with the movement of others.  That big green block largely moves together.  The few long red streaks are candidates who move opposite a … Continue reading →

Today is the 14th anniversary of the trashing of the Twin Towers in NYC. Today, as then, I am at work.

I remember the day. It was a moderate day, so we had a few rooms open. George, the tech, came scooting in and claimed an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in NYC. George had a reputation of being somewhat of a practical joker, so everyone’s first reaction was,

“Right! We don’t buy it.”

But then he went into Room 5, which faced out onto the center section of the room, and turned on the TV (no one was in the room). There we all saw the TV feed of a smoke cloud coming from one of the World Trade Center towers. We were … Continue reading →