Hey LG, it’s time to drop the BT. It’s also time to drop any other letters that are straggling to join that ever-expanding abbreviation. They”re holding you down.
In recent years, the abbreviation has swollen beyond the already bloated “LGBT” into atrocities such as “LGBTQIAP.” It has become a garbled mess that even some gays are calling “alphabet soup.” Apparently, “Bi” and “Transgendered” became too limiting, so they threw in Q (queer or questioning), I (intersex), A (asexual or allies), and P (polyamorous or pansexual). Bestiality and pedophilia haven”t been allowed past the front gate, but give them time.
The newer, more militant definitions of sexuality are “fluid” and refuse to get stuck in antiquated definitions. The only judging they allow is toward people who accept the gender they are born with. Such people are known to those in the know as “cis scum.”
Here’s the thing, gays and lesbians: We like you. We really do. Even the Pope doesn”t judge you anymore. We were wary of gay marriage for a while because we sensed you were only using it as a place to showcase your human rights. We suspected you didn”t really want to get married. (I still suspect this deep down, but I”ve become the minority.) After all, why get married if monogamy and child-rearing aren”t your thing? Why would you want to have the same fight again and again for half a century? (For my wife and I, it’s the way she overpacks every drawer in the house.)
However, you kept harping on it like a nagging housewife and eventually we said, “OK, OK, you can get married.” Even Bill O”Reilly and Rush Limbaugh finally relented. If you want to join our traditions, you”re more than welcome. If the GOP is to have a future, it needs to get over social issues. Even staunch libertarian Mark Cuban agrees.
Look, we weren”t very noble toward gaylords in the past. In our defense, you are weird creatures. You are vegetarian lions”born with gigantic fangs for ripping apart flesh, but you”d rather have a carrot. The pack needs some familiarization to get used to that. In the 50s and 60s, our police harassed the heterosexually challenged, forcing them to meet in dark alleys and nefarious speakeasies. Then, sometime after the sexual revolution, society agreed on a “Don”t Ask, Don”t Tell” policy. We knew you were gay. We weren”t blind. Freddie Mercury pranced around onstage wearing a feather boa and leather pants crooning like a high-pitched Liza Minnelli for a band called Queen. Liberace flopped around his piano like a fop. The nation laughed along with Paul Lynde as he tittered through his big gay teeth. Siegfried and Roy basked in each other’s love and bodily fluids while giant cats of indeterminate sexuality surrounded them. We understood that the Village People didn”t enjoy the YMCA simply because it was an affordable gym. We were fine with it because it wasn”t pushy.
Then the ante was upped and gay parades started featuring raving homosexuals dancing around in S&M gear and blowing each other on balconies. It went from, “We”re here and we”re probably queer” to “We”re here. We”re queer. And if you don”t like it, you can go fuck yourself.” This caused animosity. AIDS didn”t help. The backlash was so intense that the late 80s and early 90s started to resemble the 50s and 60s. I think it was around this time that gays and lesbians started to feel like post-WWII Jews and decided they had to look out for themselves because nobody else would. In the interest of numbers, they brought in anyone remotely unusual. “Queer” went from a synonym for “homosexual” to, well, anyone unusual. By the early 2000s, the LGBT movement was a proud army.
I think this was a mistake. You should have just given it time like Canada did with the Brits. Twenty-five thousand Americans died in the process of kicking out the English. Canada merely waited until the English left. Nowadays most people accept homosexuality as natural. When you see a sexual proclivity rear its purple head century after century, you conclude it’s genetic. (Rape and murder have been around forever, too, but such actions hurt people, so there’s an incentive to stop them.) By the time the lesbians and gays had assembled their misfit army of ideological terrorists, we had already accepted them.
Gays adopt. They go to church. Sure, they live a much more hedonistic lifestyle than us, but they”re still recognizable as earthlings.
But the BTQAP crowd doesn”t know what they are. What the fuck is an “ally,” and how easy is it to become one? Do you get to be part of the movement if you have a gay friend? Does that now make you oppressed? Polygamists are an oppressed class? No, they”re not. They”re a fad. We”ve seen people try it, and it always blows up in their faces. Where are all the old polygamous couples? Where are all the old bi guys or girls, for that matter? It seems like sooner or later, all “bisexuals” wind up picking one side or the other.
There is no such thing as a “cis” woman who identifies as male. You”re an annoying college student trying to sound special. You”ll have three kids and a backyard in less than a decade. Gays and lesbians remain so for life and should be wary of these hangers-on trying to cash in on someone else’s oppression. They”re like male feminists and white Rastafarians. They have nothing in common with the species they ape.
Some boffins at Harvard University claim to have transmitted information from one person’s mind to another by telepathy. Reading through the paper, I thought the content transmitted wasn”t very impressive”just the Spanish and Italian words for “hello””but hey, baby steps.
Is telepathy a thing we should hope for? I have mixed feelings, based on long acquaintance with the notion from an adolescence spent reading science fiction.
Telepathy was one of the staple themes in sci-fi of the Golden Age. This isn”t much remembered now because telepathy is hard to dramatize on movie or TV screens, which is where the last couple of generations have gotten most of their sci-fi from. Moviecus list “65 movies about telepathy,” but scanning through them, it seems that telepathy is a secondary plot device, not the main theme.
The printed page does better. There have been some fine telepath novels. In many, like John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids or A.E. van Vogt’s Slan, telepaths are a feared and hated minority. Occasionally, as in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, they are a majority, persecuting non-telepaths. Most often they are just rare freaks who understand how very unpopular they”d be if their ability was discovered, and so they keep it secret.
The best telepath stories”Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human comes to mind”are of that last variety. They cater to the common human fantasy of seeing oneself as special, possessed of extraordinary powers un-guessed at by the dumb majority: Superman, Harry Potter, etc.
There have been good thriller novels on that theme. One of the best was Eric Frank Russell’s Three to Conquer. After some childhood traumas, the solitary telepath learns to hide his gift, until one day he encounters a normal-looking woman whose mind, he perceives when probing it, has been taken over by an alien life-form. With all humanity at stake, he decides to offer his talents to the FBI. There is a hilarious interview in which he tries to persuade a G-man that he can read minds.
He smiled at Pritchard and enquired, “How’s your body?”
“Eh?”
Out of the other’s bafflement Harper extracted a clear and detailed picture of the body. He said in helpful tones, “You have a fish-shaped birthmark on the inside of your left thigh.”
Actual telepaths, if there are any, must surely be misanthropes. Most of our thoughts are garbage, or worse.
After reading that story about the Harvard researchers I went and walked my dog, monitoring my own thoughts as I walked. Here they are, categorised:
Earworms. I spend a lot of time playing tunes in my head. Today it was that silly doctor song from The Millionairess, ignited I suppose by my having recently read something in the papers about Sophia Loren.
Body issues. We all (I hope) have niggling persistent worries about our bodies. With me lately it’s been nose hairs. Mine are going through some kind of sensational growth spurt. I catch myself in the mirror and see this long bright-gold hair curling down out of a nostril, like a walrus tusk. It wasn”t there yesterday. What’s going on here?
Staircase wit. What I should have said to the guy who unhorsed me last night in a verbal joust. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
Fantasies. The less said, the better. A friend once confided to Dr. Johnson that he was troubled with “shocking impious thoughts.” Replied the great moralist: “If I was to divide my life into three parts, two of them have been filled with such thoughts.”
Six years after he was first elected President of the United States, Barack Obama remains something of an enigma to the public he presides over.
Ironically, this isn”t due to the President being particularly reticent about himself. After all, judging from his two books, the subject Obama finds most enthralling is Obama. For example, Obama’s 2012 eulogy for Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the Japanese-American war hero, used 48 first person pronouns or adjectives (such as “I,” “me,” or “my”) to recount how the young Obama had noticed Inouye on TV.
Understandably, Obama hasn”t been in any hurry to answer his political opponents” questions, toying with them for years over his birth certificate. Meanwhile, few of his supporters have felt much urge to ask him the detailed questions about his background that he”d probably love to expound upon at length. As Obama has explained, being a “blank screen” upon which voters can project their political fantasies has its advantages.
One reason for this obscurity is that aspects of Obama’s personal background are genuinely exotic to almost all Americans, which limits the quality of questions. For example, Obama’s Indonesian connections”as a child he lived in Jakarta from 1967-1971, shortly after the notorious massacre of Communists and Chinese; then in the 1980s Obama came fairly close to marrying a wealthy Australian woman with striking family ties to the highest circles of power in Indonesia—are perplexing to even the best-informed Americans.
Indonesia is an immense country (current population: a quarter of a billion), but it’s culturally remote from America. For instance, there are almost no prominent Indonesian-Americans (the Van Halen brothers, who are one-quarter Indonesian, may come closest). Movies about Indonesian history well-known in the West are limited to two curious ones about the downfall of the leftist ruler Sukarno in 1965 and the subsequent slaughter of Communists: The Year of Living Dangerously and last year’s documentary The Act of Killing.
Democrats, even Obama, don”t find Indonesians terribly interesting. It’s impossible to imagine Obama achieving anything in Democratic politics if he had not suddenly switched in the mid-1980s from what his friends called an “international” or “multicultural” identity to being Our First Black President.
And Republicans have generally found Indonesia a frustrating dead end in tying Obama to Islam or Communism. For example, the President’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, child of a wealthy Indonesian family, eventually died of liver failure at age 52, which doesn”t suggest he was terribly devout about abstaining from alcohol.
Lolo worked for an American oil company because his brother-in-law was a high official in General Suharto’s regime that had marched to power in 1965-66 over the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of its leftwing opponents.
Likewise, Obama’s mother’s first job in Indonesia was at the American embassy.
The CIA/Ford Foundation policy tended to be to try to attract everybody in the Third World even slightly to the left of Che Guevara. (I wouldn”t be surprised if Obama’s maternal grand-uncle, a Ph.D. named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, who worked for the Naval Personnel Research agency on the ultra-confidential Polaris submarine missile project, had vouched for his niece her being a good Jayhawk Unitarian liberal.)
She went on to a long career in Indonesia and Pakistan with the Ford Foundation, which during the Cold War served as the NGO avatar of the liberal American Establishment’s soft power. Inderjeet Parmar writes in The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State-Private Network:
For example, in Indonesia, where “anti-American” popular and government feelings ran high in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ford Foundation played a vital role in building key educations institution with an underlying pro-western philosophy favoring capitalistic modernization and development strategies.
And that sounds like the President’s mom’s career, which eventually focused upon promoting microfinance for women entrepreneurs.
A major American nerve center for waging the Cold War in Asia was the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. Janny Scott writes in her bestselling biography of the President’s late mom, A Singular Woman:
The summer Ann arrived in Hawaii [1960], Congress appropriated $10 million to set up the East-West Center, an institution that more than any would go on, over the next twenty-five years, to influence the direction of her life.
Lolo, an Indonesian Army officer, had arrived in Hawaii on an East-West Center grant in 1962.
Similarly, Barack Obama Sr. had gotten to the U. of Hawaii on another Cold War ploy, the Tom Mboya Airlift of promising African students to American universities. When Barack Sr. got back to Kenya, he too worked awhile for an American oil company. Although his ideological sympathies tended to be with the pro-Soviet Luo tribal leader Oginga Odinga, his all-important personal connections were with the pro-American Luo labor leader Tom Mboya.
Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book The Greatest Comeback recounts accompanying Richard Nixon to a 1967 meeting in Kenya with Mboya. Nixon and Buchanan were impressed by Mboya, but also picked up the impression that Mboya was perceived as too pro-Washington to make it all the way to the top in the rough world of Kenyan politics.
“And Tom Mboya never did,” Pat writes. After Mboya was assassinated by a Kikuyu hired gun in 1969, the final witness called by the prosecution in the hit man’s trial was the dead man’s protégé: Barack Obama Sr.
One of the more intriguing ties the President’s mother had in Indonesia was to Subud. Scott’s A Singular Woman recounts that Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro went to work for a Ford Foundation-financed English-language school at the end of the Sixties:
The school … had been started several years earlier … with the intention of helping build an Indonesian elite. … In 1970, the Ford Foundation made the first in a series of grants to the institute … She was looking for teachers. A half-dozen of them accepted her invitation, many of them members of an international spiritual organization, Subud, with a residential compound in a suburb of Jakarta.
Obama’s mom became particularly close to a Portuguese-American convert to Subud. Scott writes:
Mohammad Mansur Medeiros, a reclusive and scholarly Subud member from Fall River, Massachusetts, and Harvard, whom Ann hired as a teacher, had immersed himself so deeply in Javanese culture, language, and religion that friends nicknamed him Mansur Java. Samardal Manan … used to listen awestruck and in silence, to Ann’s freewheeling conversations with Medeiros. “You would think they were in love, but they were not,” Manan said.
Founded by a Javanese aristocrat known as Bapak, Subud’s theology was a sort of “Coexist“ bumper sticker avant la lettre. You could believe in whatever religion you wanted as long as you practiced the addictive group exercise called latihan, a sort of Javanese equivalent of an est encounter session.
“A mass movement,” wrote Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer,” “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.
“Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose, and worth by an identification with a holy cause.”
Such a man was Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a criminal with a decade-long record of drug-dealing, assault and robbery, who shot and killed a guard at Ottawa’s National War Memorial and then burst into Parliament and shot two others before being cut down.
A psychiatric evaluation of Zehaf-Bibeau in 2011 found, “He has been a devoted Muslim for seven years, and he believes he must spend time in jail as a sacrifice to pay for his mistakes in the past.”
Now Zehaf-Bibeau is known to his countrymen and the world. Now his deeds are celebrated by the Islamic State he sought to join.
To understand the appeal to such men of the Islamic State, despite its cruelties, beheadings, crucifixions, slaughter of prisoners, rape and sale into slavery of the daughters and wives of enemies, there are few better sources than the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer.
Why do young men and women travel from a free prosperous West to fight in Syria and perhaps die in a suicide bombing? What do they seek?
What does ISIS offer? And a more alarming question—why do these jihadists and terrorists continue to gain ground and attract new recruits?
Bin Laden may be dead, but he is world famous and by no means universally loathed for slaughtering 3,000 Americans. During the Bush era, he was more popular in the Muslim world than the U.S. president.
Al-Qaida may have been obliterated in Afghanistan, but has spread to Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, spawning imitators, like ISIS, from the Maghreb across the Middle East into black Africa.
Why are almost all the suicide bombers, the martyrs, on their side?
Wrote Hoffer: “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action. … All of them irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all … demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”
Does this not fairly describe the Islamic State?
Still, what does ISIS offer the young?
A second chance at a heroic life. A cause to die for. A vision of a new world as Allah intended it. Communion and camaraderie. And should one die striking a blow against the infidel, there is martyrdom and a place of honor and happiness in the world to come.
“It’s been a tough week for Canadian Muslims.”
I sincerely wish I were pulling your leg, but that’s really how the National Post began the somberly italicized deck it stuck on top of what was clearly a hastily arranged interview with career apologist for Islam Karen Armstrong.
Because after two Canadian soldiers have been murdered by Muslims in 48 hours, who better than Armstrong to help out with the “nothing to see here” whitewash? Hey, her name even starts with an A. No need to dig much deeper into that old contact list.
The Post went on to scold its readers: “[A] predictable backlash has emerged,” you see. “On Friday, for example, a mosque in Cold Lake, Alta., was vandalized, its windows smashed, its front defaced by graffiti calling for members to “go home.””
And, well, that was about it, actually. For a “backlash,” it was less Kristallnacht than Kristal-Not. The Post‘s “for example” was nakedly superfluous. Almost, weirdly, hope filled.
Never mind how many “hate crimes” against Muslims turn out to be hoaxes.
Never mind how many genuine crimes Muslims plan, and occasionally pull off, against everyone else, in Canada alone. (A handy, brain-numbing list starts at the 19:00 mark.)
For those of us following Wednesday’s terror attack via social and traditional media”hearts pounding, hands shaking“the experience was not without its moments of welcome comic relief, most of which bubbled up, it pains me to say it, from south of the border.
CNN (or as I call them, “that irritating noise you hear at the airport”) kept referring to “the Royal Canadian Mountain Police,” for which gaffe they were publicly spanked by an unlikely ombudsman: a furious expat former Playboy centerfold whose husband wears more makeup than she does.
Even less surprisingly, MSNBC host Al Sharpton (?!) asked a remote reporter, “What’s the latest tonight in Iowa?”
But I was especially struck, days later, by a homegrown tweet from one Michael Greenspan:
“National Post, Nov. 28, 1963: “It’s been a tough week for the Oswald family.””
The name “Oswald” sprang to James Fulford’s mind too. At Vdare.com, he noted how quickly the media agreed to call Wednesday’s killer a “lone gunman,” a phrase he figures was coined for popular use to describe JFK’s communist killer.
“Lone” Oswald was. Yep, I believe that, and so does Fulford”who adds, however, that “thousands of Leftists shared [Oswald’s] anti-American ideals. And there was, in fact, an International Communist Conspiracy, headed by the former Soviet Union, even if it did not authorize his shooting.”
It’s a sign of how utterly witless the authorities are that the phrase “lone gunman,” like “lone wolf,” is actually supposed to be a reassuring one.
Leaving aside its metaphorical unsoundness from a sheer zoological perspective, the elite’s “lone wolf” trope reduces the rest of us to unwilling supporting players in a mashup of Groundhog Day and Gaslight. Precisely how many “lone wolves” does it, will it, take to change a country, or a mind? A few of us serfs dare to ask our betters.
James Fulford and I have had occasion to brainstorm before, at length, the last time a young Muslim man shot up a major Canadian city.
On December 6, 1989, fourteen female engineering students were shot to death by Gamil Gharbi“better known, thanks to some hasty mass media table magic, as “Marc Lépine.”
I am perhaps unique among modern Americans in the sense that I find so-called “hate groups” to be tremendously amusing rather than appalling. Flailing about uncowed and unashamed as they do amid the suffocating current climate of toxic niceness, I”d even call them “refreshing.”
And when I say “hate group,” I”m not talking about people that used to be plain old bread-and-butter hate-free Americans yet are increasingly becoming marginalized and stigmatized due to Cultural Marxism’s ever-constricting, bloody-fanged iron vagina. I”m not referring to Republicans or people who watch Fox News or those who oppose illegal immigration or those who don”t think that male-to-female transsexuals are actually women. Terms such as “hate speech” and “hate groups” have swollen to surreal, dirigible-sized proportions. It’s gotten to the point where such easy epithets apply to just about everyone except the self-appointed and maniacally vigilant Hate Police.
No, I mean groups and individuals that pulsate and throb with unabashed, drooling hatred. I don”t mean groups who are accused of being hateful; I mean ones that get right up in your face and tell you they”re full of hate. I”m talking about those who don’t shy away from identifying their enemies and then will unblinkingly go into graphic detail describing the torments and tortures they will inflict upon them. Framed as they are within this dreadfully medicated and morbidly smiley-faced modern world, I find such jagged incongruity hilarious. Quite simply, I enjoy hate groups.
For two decades running”ever since a friend sent me a VHS tape of them harassing the fuck out of frightened passersby in Times Square”my “favorite” hate group has been the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, notably the screamingly belligerent iterations that infest street corners in the Northeast and Midwest bellowing through microphones and megaphones about “crackers” and “faggots” and “so-called Negroes.”
For starters, I like the way they, well…goad people. I also enjoy their pharaonic sense of couture, which is an odd mix of Arabian Nights and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
The dogmatic thread that unifies these various splinter groups is the belief that they are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites. For example, The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ preaches that ex-Africans stranded by slavery in America are descended from the tribe of Judah, while Haitians are the tribe of Levi, and the tribe of Ephraim eventually became what are now known as Puerto Ricans.
Various oddball religious sects of American blacks have preached they were the True Jews going all the way back to the late 1800s, but the more recent manifestations of the “Black Hebrew” meme really know how to bring the hate like nobody’s business.
The following statements were allegedly made over loudspeakers on a Center City Philadelphia street corner by members of the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, a small yet disproportionately loud subsect currently based in Upper Darby, PA, a piddling four miles from my hometown of Clifton Heights:
May the white man die today. May the Chinese man die today. May the East Indian man die today. … All your sons is [sic] homosexuals. All your women becoming homosexual. And becoming whores.
The scriptures say black woman, shut your damn mouth.
We”ll be happy for it man. When we can take your little white children with them big heads man and them blond”and that blond hair, right, and the blue eyes and smashed [sic] they head against the walls man. I wanna catch one coming out the womb and rip him from his feet and take him and smash his head against the damn floor man.
Don”t misunderstand me”if one of these idiots tried laying a hand on my son, I”d do everything in my power to ensure their stupid coconuts got smashed first. It’s not that I approve of their message, but I admire their honesty. It’s helpful when your self-declared enemies are so eager to make themselves known.
Commandeered by a man who calls himself “General Yahanna,” the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge (ISUPK) features YouTube videos with titles such as “HEBREW ISRAELITES make WHITE COLLEGE GIRL CRY in CHICAGO,” “JEWISH BOYS find out THEY are NOT THE REAL JEWS, “ARABS HATE BLACK PEOPLE,” and “BLACK WOMEN ARE OUT OF CONTROL IN AMERICA PT.1.”
The Week’s Most Contagious, Courageous, and Outrageous Headlines
A LITTLE VIRUS IN THE BIG APPLE
Craig Spencer, a volunteer physician for Doctors Without Borders, will go down in history as the missionary who brought the Ebola virus to New York City. He is the Johnny Appleseed of Ebola in the Big Apple.
After weeks spent volunteering in Guinea”where an estimated 440 healthcare workers have already contracted Ebola despite American authorities” blanket assurances that the lethal virus is extremely difficult to transmit”an asymptomatic Spencer returned to NYC on October 17. Upon his return he was still infected with a case of wanderlust, as he reportedly rode two different Manhattan subway lines, visited a Brooklyn bowling alley, jogged along Riverside Drive, ate at a meatball shop, and hailed Uber cars to and from Brooklyn.
On Thursday, though, he tested positive for the Ebola virus. He was placed in isolation at Bellevue Hospital, where he reportedly kept “lecturing the staff about proper treatment,” which couldn”t have been very reassuring to staff members, seeing as their lecturer somehow slipped on a viral banana peel in Africa and became infected.”Better to be paranoid and alive than dead and gullible.”
In mid-September, Barack Obama had delivered the following comments at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta:
…I want the American people to know that our experts, here at the CDC and across our government, agree that the chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low. We”ve been taking the necessary precautions, including working with countries in West Africa to increase screening at airports so that someone with the virus doesn”t get on a plane for the United States. In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores, we”ve taken new measures so that we”re prepared here at home.
That “unlikely event” has happened, yet authorities and pundits continue to dismiss any apprehension among the citizenry as fear and paranoia rather than an awakened survival instinct.
“Being on the same subway car or living near a person with Ebola does not in itself put someone at risk,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference Thursday evening.
New York news anchor Errol Louis went so far as to smarmily imply that so long as city residents don”t pick up feces or mucus and “eat it,” they should be fine. Again and again, the trembling human sardines packed into New York City were lectured that this is not an airborne virus and it is nearly impossible to catch.
Perhaps it depends on how one defines “airborne.” According to the World Health Organization, Ebola can be transmitted when:
…virus-laden heavy droplets are directly propelled by coughing or sneezing (which does not mean airborne transmission) onto the mucus membranes or skin with cuts or abrasions of another person.
According to this 2012 study, a strain of Ebola was passed from pigs to macaques “without direct contact.” And according to a 1995 study titled “Lethal experimental infections of rhesus monkeys by aerosolized Ebola virus“:
We…demonstrated aerosol transmission of Ebola virus at lower temperature and humidity than that normally present in sub-Saharan Africa
Hmmm…what environment on Earth would have lower temperatures and humidity than sub-Saharan Africa? Oh, right”New York City in the fall.
“Doctors Without Borders,” indeed. The feds” slack response may be directly related to that without-borders thing. Either they are hopelessly inept and untrustworthy, or they are deliberately permitting both a demographic and viral infiltration. Americans were assured that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 would not substantially alter the nation’s demographics. That was either a severely misinformed promise or an outright lie. This Ebola crisis is already far worse than was promised only a month ago. Better to be paranoid and alive than dead and gullible.
A HILARIOUS NEW SITCOM ABOUT ILLEGAL ALIENS
Lee Aronsohn, co-creator of the sitcom Two And A Half Men, has signed a deal with ABC to help write and produce Totally Illegal, a comedy about a rural Canadian woman who slips into the USA without papers and finds refuge with a totally legal multigenerational Mexican-American family. As everyone knows, this is the standard scenario for illegal immigrants to America. As not nearly enough people know”or are willing to articulate”most Hollywood producers can afford to cloister themselves from the downsides of illegal immigration.
Life is a struggle, or at least a pendulum swing, between complacency and panic. No doubt most of us are more inclined by temperament to one than to the other, and it is a moot point as to which, when unjustified or inappropriate, does the more harm. Personally I am more inclined to complacency than to panic, perhaps because I find my own life satisfactory, grosso modo, and change is therefore more likely to harm me than to do me good. Besides, there is no happiness without complacency, and even the happy revolutionary is complacent in his own way, namely in that he is acting to bring about the best for humanity, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
The correct appreciation of danger is a difficult art. Man is by nature paranoid”paranoia is a common psychological expression of many different physiological disturbances, suggesting that it is in some sense fundamental in the human psyche”and he, Man, tends to believe that the universe constantly focuses its attention on him. We all think that the universe reciprocates our gaze: because we are looking at it, it is looking at us. I catch myself thinking paranoid thoughts quite often before I consciously put them behind me.
For example, the other day I was traveling by train from a busy station, and the only”yes, the ONLY”train out of scores of trains scheduled that was delayed was the one that I proposed to travel on. Furthermore, this has happened to me more than once, so that they, whoever they are, must be deliberately trying to inconvenience me.
I soon realize that there is no they there. That this appears to happen to me often is an illusion caused by the fact that when a train is delayed that I am not proposing to catch, I scarcely notice it, and certainly do not remember it.
Or again, only last week I was driving to a town 120 miles away when I noticed that all the traffic hold-ups were in my direction: the traffic in the opposite direction flowed without friction, like oil through fingers. But on my return, it was exactly the other way round: again the hold-ups were in my direction only. They were at it again, obstructing and frustrating me at every turn.
As it happened, the town to which I had gone was poor and miserable enough to have a secondhand bookshop: it is only in such towns that such booksellers these days can afford the rent of a shop. And there I happened on a book whose introduction was such that I could not resist buying it:
It is not possible to state definitively why the members of the Human Leopard Society ate their victims. There was, however, one outstanding fact: all the principal offenders were men of mature age, past their prime; they were the ones who, so to speak, managed the concern, who arranged for victims, and who received the most coveted portions of the slaughtered bodies; and I formed the impression that when they devoured the human flesh the idea uppermost in their minds was that they were increasing their virile powers.
The title of the book was Human Leopards: An Account of the Trials of Human Leopards Before the Special Commission Court: With a Note on Sierra Leone, Past and Present, by K. J. Beatty of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law for Some Years Resident in Sierra Leone. It was published in that great year for civilization, 1915, and this particular copy had once belonged to the library of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
Reading on in the book, I could not help but notice that quite a few of the alleged victims were young, feeble-minded, and vulnerable relatives of senior members of the Human Leopard Society, which made me wonder whether the Human Leopard Society had not been a kind of eugenic organization in leopard-skin disguise, that is to say the means by which important men disposed of unproductive persons whose mouths they had otherwise to feed.
Take my country, please “ We don’t need no steenkin’ rules “ The
immigration imperative “ No-one to vote for “ Favors for scofflaws “
Words and music “ Strategic leaks for Ferguson “ Prepping for the Big
One “ Democracy? Ugh! “ Educating the elite
I have always believed that the mission of post-Fred & Ginger movies has been to reduce, insofar as it lay within their power, the manners and morals of the community. Long before the camera was invented, the ancient Greeks used to throw playwrights in jail for corrupting society, old Aristophanes always one step ahead of the sheriff, a practice that has not been followed by our generation because there are not enough jail cells to accommodate all the ruffians responsible. In between, Cervantes was a jailbird and funny with money, Lope de Vega liked talking about rape a bit too much, Ben Jonson killed a man and went to jail three times, Racine was a gigolo to Madame de Maintenon, Milton was a wife beater who ended up in a madhouse, Samuel Johnson did a Taki twice for debts, Voltaire was constantly thrown out of Paris and France and did Bastille time, Diderot stole money from a priest, and the wonderful Tennessee Williams abused booze and boys all of his short life. The list goes on and on, and only the sainted and best of all, Sir Tom Stoppard, escapes the Hall of Shame.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. The men who directed and wrote the motion picture I’m about to review have as much in common with the above names as popinjays do with lions, their lack of talent constituting a legitimate disability. The movie premier of Fury, starring Brad Pitt, was well attended by homeless people, or so it seemed, as the dress code was expensive rags and pork-pie hats as worn by the richest hobo of them all, Brad Pitt himself, who waved from the stage but said nothing, thank God. I was a guest of Michael Mailer, hence I will control the vitriol; suffice it to say that 15 minutes into the gross-out, porno-violent movie, I was rooting for Brad to be killed, preferably roasted alive inside his Sherman tank.
The blood orgy was directed by one David Ayer, whose imaginative powers are on a par with those of a mosquito seeking blood. (Human faces lie around like dirty underwear, bodies are flattened out by tanks and become parts of the landscape, limbs and heads are severed, all in glorious Technicolor.) Pitt is the non-com officer who leads his crew into battle, taking on single-handedly a German battalion of 600, when all he has to do is walk away and fight another day.
Five Americans against 600 Germans; now, that’s instructive, because I always thought by April 17, 1945, when the movie supposedly takes place, it was the other way round. Pitt finally dies a hero, but as I watched him perform his celluloid heroics, the only image that came to mind was a real story, one that took place long ago with Brad begging Mike Tyson—who mistakenly thought pretty boy was coming on to his wife and was faking anger—“Please, dude, don’t, for God’s sake don’t …”
Oh well, we can’t all be heroes in real life; some are only so on reel. What this movie needs is a bit of range, a bit of subtlety, a bit of talent, and a different director, different script, a different writer, and different actors. Otherwise, in its present state, only Dracula and ghouls will enjoy it. In fact, it could be advertised as the movie that turned Count Dracula to masturbation. But I’m being too hard on these “artists.” This is a low, dishonest period in film, with no class and certainly no dignity. Unarmed, unresisting prisoners with their hands up are executed by our American heroes, something that definitely took place and was done by both the good and bad guys during that terrible war, especially at the end. But to show it as deserved, a comeuppance, is a cheap shot that appeals to anti-German ghouls. No one, even among the bravest of the brave, wanted to risk his life two weeks before Germany surrendered, not even the Russians; but neither has anyone in modern Hollywood read history, so I shouldn’t quibble. Just take my advice and stay away.
