Monday, July 2, 2018
"There Are Some Things Worse than Death"
“There are Worse Things than Death”
“Among the attitudes brought from the Old World was the ancient system for determining who belonged among the worthy and who did not. The first signs of an archaic honor appeared in the forests – not where Hawthorne’s story opens, but in regions beyond the Alps, before Christ, before Rome. The ethic of honor had Indo-European origins.
From the wilderness of central Europe and Asia a succession of conquering tribes had come into prehistoric Greece, then, a millennia later, into Roman Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Great Britain, and finally, in the last upheaval, by sea from Scandinavia into parts of the once Roman world.
These peoples shared a number of ideas about how men and women should behave. They had thoughts in common about the nature of the human body, the mind, the soul, the meaning of life, time, natural order, and death. Myths, rituals, oaths, grave sites, artifacts, and most especially word roots all indicate a common fund of human perceptions that lasted in popular thought from antique to recent ages.
The overriding principle for these generations of human beings was an ethic almost entirely external in nature. It was easily comprehended and was considered physically demonstrable without resort to abstraction, without ambivalence or ambiguity. Differentiation of what belonged in the public or private realm were very imprecise [and evaluations] depended upon appearances, not upon cold logic. Southern whites retained something of that emphasis.
As Walker Percy, the contemporary novelist, once remarked about the South of not long ago, there was an “absence of a truly public zone” completely separate from the interior life of the family, so that the latter “came to coincide with the actual public space which it inhabited.” Family values differed not at all from public ones.
Intimately related to brave conduct . . . was family protectiveness. [When] the Civil War began, Samuel David Sanders of Georgia mused about Confederate enlistment, “I would be disgraced if I staid at home, and unworthy of my revolutionary ancestors.” Moreover, these strictures kept the armies in the field.
Said a kinswoman of Mary Chestnut in 1865: “Are you like Aunt Mary? Would you be happier if all the men in the family were killed? To our amazement, quiet Miss C took up the cudgels – nobly. “Yes, if their life disgraced them. There are worse things than death.”
(Southern Honor, Ethics & Behavior in the Old South, Bertram Wyatt Brown, Oxford University Press, 1982, excerpts pp. 33-35)
The Left needs to face reality: Trump is winning
Via Susan
To understand the madness gripping American leftists, try to see the
world through their eyes. Presto, you’re now part of the raging
resistance.
Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.
You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.
You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.
And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?
You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.
And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.
For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.
If children are their main concern, they could help the 23,000 New York City kids living in shelters. Or they could have attended the funeral of Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, the innocent Bronx teen hacked to death by a Dominican gang.
Instead, they give in to Trump Derangement Syndrome, which causes them to immediately and absolutely adopt the opposite position of the president’s — facts and common sense be damned.
Alas, they may look back on the last few months as the good old days. For Trump, despite his stumbles and the Mueller shadow, is finding a political sweet spot.
He is reaching a high-water mark in his presidency, with his support growing and expanding. Events, including big Supreme Court rulings and Kennedy’s retirement, give him chances to pad his advantage.
It’s a swift reversal from just 11 days ago, when Trump was sucking wind. The media was — again — treating him like a piñata over the separation of families on the border, and the White House was ready to fight a war it couldn’t win.
Then the president suddenly called off the dogs to sign an executive order ending family separations. Much of the hot air instantly came out of the resistance balloon, though protests continue because the left is embracing little or no border control as its passion of the moment.
Whether it’s because of Trump’s quick reversal and/or the left’s overreaction, polls are capturing the president’s rising fortunes. One survey showed most Americans were not nearly as sympathetic to the illegal border crossers as the media.
“I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here,” a Minnesota woman told the Times.
Another poll shows Trump with 90 percent support among Republicans, matching the backing of President George W. Bush after 9/11.
And his support is broadening. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll showed his approval rating hitting 47 percent, a two-point gain in one month driven by a 10-point swing among Hispanic voters and a four-point gain among Democrats.
Pollsters attributed the rise to the strong economy and that a whopping 75 percent approved of the president’s decision to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Finally, a Pew finding about Trump supporters upends stereotypes: Just 31 percent are white men without college degrees, while 66 percent are college graduates, women or nonwhites.
These signs of the Big Mo switching sides came before two Supreme Court rulings that favored Trump. The first upheld his revised travel ban for a handful of Muslim-majority nations, saying it was within his executive authority.
It rebuked lower-court judges who bought the partisan canard that it was a “Muslim ban.” Their invalid rulings stood in stark contrast to plain readings of the law and show them to be hacks blowing with the political wind.
The second ruling, which blocks municipal unions from forcing workers to pay dues, is a tax cut for workers who opt out and a blow to Dems in New York, New Jersey and other blue states. The nexus between unions and Democrats turned those states into one-party fiefdoms — and resulted in union contracts taxpayers can’t afford.
Both rulings were 5-4, with Kennedy supplying the swing votes in an otherwise evenly divided court. That Trump will soon nominate his successor and likely have that person confirmed before the midterm elections improves GOP chances to hold Congress and the president’s chance to cement his legacy as an agent of dramatic change.
Because Democrats set the agenda for most media, the immediate talking point was that abortion rights are threatened with another GOP pick. While that is unlikely, given the Supremes’ traditional respect for precedent, the larger fact is that there is much more at stake than any single issue.
Consider that the travel-ban case upheld broad presidential authority on national security, and the union ruling was among several supporting First Amendment rights of individuals against government infringement.
Rulings like these have long-term cultural and political impacts and explain why Supreme Court appointments can have an outsize influence on a president’s legacy.
Already Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick, is enormously popular with those who believe a justice’s job is to make sure laws pass constitutional muster, not legislate from the bench. A second pick in the Gorsuch mold would secure a majority on the court for curbing government’s appetite for more domestic power, perhaps for decades.
And that could do something extraordinary for Trump’s legacy. All else being stable, putting the Supreme Court on an enduring constitutional footing would make his presidency one of the most consequential of any age.
Cue the wailing.
Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.
You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.
You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.
And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?
You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.
And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.
For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.
If children are their main concern, they could help the 23,000 New York City kids living in shelters. Or they could have attended the funeral of Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, the innocent Bronx teen hacked to death by a Dominican gang.
Instead, they give in to Trump Derangement Syndrome, which causes them to immediately and absolutely adopt the opposite position of the president’s — facts and common sense be damned.
Alas, they may look back on the last few months as the good old days. For Trump, despite his stumbles and the Mueller shadow, is finding a political sweet spot.
He is reaching a high-water mark in his presidency, with his support growing and expanding. Events, including big Supreme Court rulings and Kennedy’s retirement, give him chances to pad his advantage.
It’s a swift reversal from just 11 days ago, when Trump was sucking wind. The media was — again — treating him like a piñata over the separation of families on the border, and the White House was ready to fight a war it couldn’t win.
Then the president suddenly called off the dogs to sign an executive order ending family separations. Much of the hot air instantly came out of the resistance balloon, though protests continue because the left is embracing little or no border control as its passion of the moment.
Whether it’s because of Trump’s quick reversal and/or the left’s overreaction, polls are capturing the president’s rising fortunes. One survey showed most Americans were not nearly as sympathetic to the illegal border crossers as the media.
“I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here,” a Minnesota woman told the Times.
Another poll shows Trump with 90 percent support among Republicans, matching the backing of President George W. Bush after 9/11.
And his support is broadening. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll showed his approval rating hitting 47 percent, a two-point gain in one month driven by a 10-point swing among Hispanic voters and a four-point gain among Democrats.
Pollsters attributed the rise to the strong economy and that a whopping 75 percent approved of the president’s decision to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Finally, a Pew finding about Trump supporters upends stereotypes: Just 31 percent are white men without college degrees, while 66 percent are college graduates, women or nonwhites.
These signs of the Big Mo switching sides came before two Supreme Court rulings that favored Trump. The first upheld his revised travel ban for a handful of Muslim-majority nations, saying it was within his executive authority.
It rebuked lower-court judges who bought the partisan canard that it was a “Muslim ban.” Their invalid rulings stood in stark contrast to plain readings of the law and show them to be hacks blowing with the political wind.
The second ruling, which blocks municipal unions from forcing workers to pay dues, is a tax cut for workers who opt out and a blow to Dems in New York, New Jersey and other blue states. The nexus between unions and Democrats turned those states into one-party fiefdoms — and resulted in union contracts taxpayers can’t afford.
Both rulings were 5-4, with Kennedy supplying the swing votes in an otherwise evenly divided court. That Trump will soon nominate his successor and likely have that person confirmed before the midterm elections improves GOP chances to hold Congress and the president’s chance to cement his legacy as an agent of dramatic change.
Because Democrats set the agenda for most media, the immediate talking point was that abortion rights are threatened with another GOP pick. While that is unlikely, given the Supremes’ traditional respect for precedent, the larger fact is that there is much more at stake than any single issue.
Consider that the travel-ban case upheld broad presidential authority on national security, and the union ruling was among several supporting First Amendment rights of individuals against government infringement.
Rulings like these have long-term cultural and political impacts and explain why Supreme Court appointments can have an outsize influence on a president’s legacy.
Already Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick, is enormously popular with those who believe a justice’s job is to make sure laws pass constitutional muster, not legislate from the bench. A second pick in the Gorsuch mold would secure a majority on the court for curbing government’s appetite for more domestic power, perhaps for decades.
And that could do something extraordinary for Trump’s legacy. All else being stable, putting the Supreme Court on an enduring constitutional footing would make his presidency one of the most consequential of any age.
Cue the wailing.
Ron Paul: Who’s Afraid of the Trump/Putin Summit?
President Trump would be wise to ignore the neocon talking heads and think tank “experts” paid by defense contractors. He should ignore the “never Trumpers” who have yet to make a coherent policy argument opposing the president. The extent of their opposition to Trump seems to be “he’s mean and rude.” Let us hope that a Trump/Putin meeting begins a move toward real reconciliation and away from the threat of nuclear war.
President Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton was in Moscow last week organizing what promises to be an historic summit meeting between his boss and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bolton, who has for years demanded that the US inflict “pain” on Russia and on Putin specifically, was tasked by Trump to change his tune. He was forced to shed some of his neoconservative skin and get involved in peacemaking. Trump surely deserves some credit for that!
More @ The Ron Paul Institute
Survey Finds Among White Millenial Men, 23% Move From Dems To GOP In Last Two Years
The Democrats have been relishing their popularity with millenials for a variety of reasons: 55% of millennials voted for Hillary Clinton, while roughly 33% voted for Donald Trump; an AP-Norc/MTV Youth Political Pulse poll found only 33% of young Americans approve of President Trump’s actions in handling his job as president, while the majority believe he is “mentally unfit” (60%), “generally dishonest” (62%) or “a racist” (63%); and a Pew Research Center study found millennials gave a 64% job approval rating to President Obama in 2009-2010 but only 27% approval of Trump in 2017-2018.
So why should Democrats worry?
More @ The Daily Wire
Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism
“This troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society regarding socialism and the systemic failure of our education system to teach students about the genocide, destruction, and misery caused by communism since the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago”The majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalistic one, according to a new poll.
In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism,” 58 percent of the up-and-coming generation opted for one of the three systems, compared to 42 percent who said they were in favor of capitalism.
More @ GOP USA
A Wall is Not Enough
Via Mike
Important Priorities and Cautions in Immigration Reform
Beginning in 2012, I wrote a series of articles entitled: The Anti-Weasel Checklist—Notes on Understanding Immigration Issues. I have written more than 650 articles since my retirement as an investment executive with a large national brokerage firm in 2005, and at least 75 of them have addressed the growing disaster and accumulating dangers of out-of-control immigration and the nation-destroying prospects of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
More @ The Times Examiner
5 Myths About Nordic Socialism Peddled By the Left
Via David
In reality, socialism has hurt Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden. The US should avoid their mistakes, not repeat them.
At first glance, it seems that the Nordic countries of Europe have become everything the Left admires: prosperous, yet equal and with good social outcomes. And the left loves to attribute it all to socialism. But a closer look shows that what the left admires about Nordic societies is not due to socialism, and that the true lesson from Nordic countries is the importance of free markets and a vibrant work ethic.
Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have one thing in common — they all admire Nordic-style democratic socialism. In a debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders, for example, said he was going to explain to Americans what democratic socialism is: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”
At first glance, it seems that the Nordic countries of Europe have become everything the Left admires: prosperous, yet equal and with good social outcomes. And the left loves to attribute it all to socialism. But a closer look shows that what the left admires about Nordic societies is not due to socialism, and that the true lesson from Nordic countries is the importance of free markets and a vibrant work ethic.
Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have one thing in common — they all admire Nordic-style democratic socialism. In a debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders, for example, said he was going to explain to Americans what democratic socialism is: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”
More @ Stream
Killing Cousins: A Tale of Three Axis Submachine Guns
The Second World War was the bloodiest, most expansive conflict in all of human history. World War 2 affected most everybody on the planet. Empires rose and fell, and upwards of sixty million people lost their lives. Roughly 3% of the world’s population perished during those six horrible years.
World War 2 saw desperation on a planetary scale. Nation states struggled for their very existence, straining every aspect of their respective societies to raise and equip armies on an unprecedented scale. The United States became known as the Arsenal of Democracy, and Allied forces in all combat theaters used American equipment to varying degrees.
More @ Guns America
Stunning revelation buried deep in IG report blows hole in Lynch-Clinton tarmac meeting narrative
A stunning revelation buried deep inside Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation suggests the controversial June 2016 tarmac meeting between then Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton was coordinated.
If true, it blows a hole in the narrative Lynch and Clinton have maintained for two years. Lynch claimed the “social” meeting was spontaneous and the two discussed grandchildren.
What does Horowitz’s report say?
More @ The Blaze
Trump's trade critics are wrong -- His tariffs could bring major benefits to America
As President Trump prepares to head to a summit
with NATO allies in Belgium July 11 and another summit with Russian
President Vladimir Putin in Finland July 16, he’s drawing criticism from
Democrats, some Republicans and many foreign governments for imposing
tariffs on imported goods.
The president’s critics accuse him of
recklessly starting a trade war that will be bad for America and the
global economy. They couldn’t be more wrong – and here’s why.
More @ Fox
The Marine Corps, 1966: Not Too Many Snowflakes By Fred Reed
This is criminally long. It will probably leave no space on the internet for anything else. It was published in the magazine of Army Times in 1979. It describes a Parris Island that no longer exists.
In fact it describes a world that no longer exists. The thought of some effeminate Sanowflake telling a Marine DI that he needed a Safe Space so he wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, poor darling–well, it just charms me. He would develop a whole new understanding of “uncomfortable.”
Anyway, the piece will resonate with a few Marine old-timers now long in the tooth. Semper fi.
More @ LRC
Never Trumpers Suffer Yet Another Utter Humiliation
Via Billy
Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.
Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.
More @ Townhall