The Week’s Most Dated, Faded, and Hated Headlines
BIBI GO BYE-BYE?
Rumors have long circulated among Mossad insiders that the nation of Israel doesn’t actually possess any nuclear weapons and that the “Samson Option” was merely an inside joke referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s infamous bursts of silent-but-deadly flatulence.
We cannot confirm this rumor at press time because we do not control the media, but we can report that as of last week, Netanyahu becomes Israel’s first “sitting” prime minister to be hauled into court on corruption charges.
No wonder he seems so paunchy—it’s all that sitting he does.
The charges stem from three different “affairs,” which kind of sounds exciting until you realize they had nothing to do with sex. He is accused of bribing a media owner to give him positive coverage in exchange for some behind-the-scenes string-pulling; for breach of public trust as a result of “receiving hundreds of thousands of shekels in gifts from rich tycoons”; and another breach-of-public-trust charge for allegedly helping one media outlet grind another one out of existence in exchange for glowing coverage of Netanyahu.
We wish Bibi the best of luck in fighting off charges which are clearly motivated by anti-Semitism and a nihilistic urge to drag Israel down to the status of Third World countries such as the United States.
WHY CHILDREN SHOULDN’T READ COMIC BOOKS
No one has ever accused Bolivians of being intelligent—at least not to our knowledge, and we know a lot. With a national mean IQ of 85, it’s no wonder that so many of them have yet to figure out how to get out of Bolivia.
It is an established scientific fact that comic books make people less intelligent—point-blank, period, end of discussion, sign on the dotted line, pack your bags and head for summer camp. But since everyone knows this is true, why are they allowing an already intellectually deprived Bolivian populace to read comic books?
In the sleepy, dopey, sneezy, bashful town of Chayanta, Bolivia—actually, we’re pretty sure that all of the seven dwarfs live there—three boys aged 12, 10, and 8 were recently herding goats (that may or may not be a euphemism) when they chanced upon a black widow spider, a lethal species that was originally named in honor of Coretta Scott King. Being so superstitious that they actually thought the legend of Spider-Man was true, they figured they would be able to scale buildings and squirt cobwebs from their wrists like so much Silly String if they could provoke the poisonous critter to bite them. They kept poking li’l Coretta with a stick until she obliged. They were rushed to the hospital, where they would spend a week before the fevers and tremors subsided.
According to one Bolivian official, “for children, everything is real, movies are real.” Sure, if you define “children” as “everyone up to age 100.” One of the major problems of modern civilization is that to most people, especially the younger generations who are almost entirely composed of pop-culture inbreds, movies are more real than their own lives are.
SWISS GROUP PUBLISHES COVID-FRIENDLY SEX POSITIONS FOR HOOKERS
Our website analytics suggest that at least one of our readers is a legitimate Swiss sex worker—yes, the government actually sanctions them there—who is simultaneously impoverished by the COVID-19 epidemic and outraged by the fact that a black market has emerged for “real” hookers to scoop up cash and spread infections by filling the gaping market demand.
A sex-workers’-rights organization with the unwieldy name of ProKoRe recently issued some safe-sex guidelines for government hoes who will shortly be returning to work after a lockdown that started two months ago is lifted. Among these guidelines:
• “Doggy Style” and “Reverse Cowgirl” are the preferred sexual positions, since they allow the receptive partner to turn their face away from the disgusting pig who paid to have sex with them and who might be exhaling billions of COVID-infected water droplets with his every horny snort.
• Sex workers should wear mouth and nose coverings at all times, which is going to put a serious hurtin’ on their oral-sex revenues.
• Rooms where hookers and their pathetic clients have recently finished performing sex should be ventilated for a minimum of 15 minutes.
• Bed sheets should be washed at a minimum of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
• To help raise money for a nationwide facemask fund, clients will be charged $5 extra for receiving either a Dirty Sanchez or a Cleveland Steamer.
Just kidding about the last one. We were just checking to see if you were still paying attention.
POSSIBLE IMMIGRANT WOMAN ARRESTED FOR LEAVING ANTI-IMMIGRANT NOTES
With her boxer’s nose and swarthy features, 52-year-old Nancy Arechiga of San Leandro, CA would, by most observers, be classified as a nonwhite woman.
She also writes like someone for whom English is not a first language:
If you are a woman or man and was born in other country, return, go back to your land immediatly, [sic] fast, with urgency.
If you are a woman was born in other country, takes your children with you, under 21 years old, consider a bless of God….
We the People:
do ordain you to leave this house.
One American, white, brave, that serves the Nation or USA is going to live here.
That is an excerpt from one of five notes police say Arechiga taped to the front doors of predominantly Asian households in San Leandro.
Police have arrested the dark-skinned woman with the odd Basque surname and charged her with—Public Racism? Public Speaking? Felonious Taping of Angry Notes? We’re not sure what the crime is here, because the news accounts haven’t specified.
We’ve been subjected to the usual volleys of “Hate has no home here,” “We won’t tolerate intolerance,” “Let’s kill this type of person before they start killing our type of people,” but Nancy may have the last laugh—from all appearances, this broad ain’t even white!
NORMAL WOMAN CLAIMS TRANNIES BULLIED HER
It’s getting to the point where a normal woman can’t tell some guy who thinks he’s a woman, “Tag—you’re a man and I’m a woman because I have a vagina and you don’t” without swarms of mentally disturbed trannies swooping down on her and pecking her to bits like bitter gulls attacking Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Such is the unenviable fate of Raquel Rosario-Sanchez, who is considering a lawsuit against Bristol University for refusing to sanction a group of “masked protestors” who allegedly distributed leaflets encouraging people to give Sanchez “hell” and chant “scum, scum, scum” whenever they saw her.
“Trans activists used bullying in an attempt to stifle my free speech as a defender of women’s rights while my university did nothing to stop them,” Sanchez laments.
If this goes the way these things typically go, authorities will wind up forcing Sanchez to get a sex change with no anesthesia to atone for her transphobia.
WHEN IS IT WRONG TO REMOVE A SWASTIKA FROM A NAZI SOLDIER’S TOMBSTONE?
In case you were unaware—we were—that the US Army kept thousands of captured German POWs in America during WWII, that’s exactly what they did. And according to international convention, when those POWs died in American custody, they were given burials that honored their service to their homeland.
In at least three cases, their tombstones feature a swastika inside an iron cross along with the inscription, “He died far from his home for the Führer, people and fatherland.” Apparently this is required by international preservation laws and is in accordance with what is traditionally deemed to be a proper burial.
No one had a problem with this until a week or so ago when the usual suspects began barking and howling and kvetching about it. People with surnames such as Weinstein and Rosenshein and Wasserman-Schultz began demanding that at the very least, each swastika-toting tombstone be replaced.
It occurred to us that we’ve never seen Germans trying to meddle with what’s on tombstones in Jewish cemeteries. As each day goes by, it becomes clearer who won that war.
FRENCH CHEF AT GERMAN RESTAURANT: “CHINESE ARE NOT WELCOME!!!!”
Jean-Claude Bourgueil is a top-ranked chef who plies his trade at a little place called Im Schiffchen on the east bank of the Rhine River near Düsseldorf, Germany. He jumped on board at the restaurant in 1977, earned it a Michelin ranking a decade later, and in 2006 received the French Legion of Honor Medal.
But now he’s gone and blown it all to hell by announcing on Facebook that his restaurant was reopening after the months-long lockdown but that “Chinese are not welcome!!!!”
Eighteen separate Chinese organizations in Germany accused him of racism. Düsseldorf’s mayor gave Bourgueil a very public tsk-tsking. In his defense, Bourgueil said he was targeting the Chinese government rather than the Chinese people, and he really expects us to believe the entire Chinese government could fit in his little rinky-dink bistro.
NURSING-HOME BEATING STORY QUIETLY GOES TO SLEEP
As of this writing, several major US cities are ablaze because it appears—at first glance, at least—that black Americans and the American media may have finally found a case where a white cop murdered a black man on video. It’s been the top story in the country for days.
The publicity comes at the expense of a ghastly pair of videos allegedly filmed and posted online by a burly 20-year-old black man, an alleged COVID-19 patient who’d been assigned a bed in a Detroit nursing home, repeatedly punching two elderly white men, bloodying one and causing head injuries to the other.
In one of the videos, Jaden T. Hayden—hey, that rhymes!—is shown pummeling an old white man, whose face is shown streaming with blood, before dragging him off a mattress and growling, “This bitch-ass nigger wouldn’t get off my bed.”
Although Hayden is being charged with assault, he has yet to be accused of a hate crime. That’s right—even in 2020 a man can use the “N” word and get away with it. Such is the state of “justice” in Donald Trump’s America.
I used to think that the walls of my flat in Paris were solid enough to be soundproof; until, that is, the new tenant moved in next door.
He was not an unpleasant young man (of about 30 years old). He had the look of an intellectual, but of course one mustn’t judge an intellect by its beard. Unfortunately he belonged to the class of person that, during the great confinement, was capable of télétravail, working at home via computer and telephone. I say unfortunately because he was possessed of one of those voices that, though not necessarily very loud, was acutely and deeply penetrating (I have noticed that in American restaurants there is often, if not quite always, a woman possessed of such a voice).
Rather unusually for such a type, though, his was not a high-pitched voice; rather it was low, more a volcanic rumble than a diamond that cuts glass, a drone rather than a shriek. I have never heard a man speak so continually. Sydney Smith said of the great historian Macaulay that he had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful, but in the case of my neighbor the flashes of silence were replaced by a deep baritone errrrr. One could not say that he was drawing second breath because he never came to the end of his first. The worst thing about his voice, perhaps, was its monotone. A man reading a telephone directory—in the days when there were such things—would have put more expression into the recitation of page 487 of the list.
I can’t hear what he’s talking about, except the occasional disconnected word, but it seems that his social life is the continuation of his professional life, except that very occasionally a woman tries to say something but is doomed soon to be drowned out by the droning monotone. He can talk—or at least speak—until one in the morning.
Oddly enough, I am not as irritated by him as I might have expected, probably because I also feel sorry for him. In a word, he is a terrible bore and I have a soft spot for bores. There are many worse people in the world than bores, and at parties, which I find more boring than any single bore could ever be by himself, I always seek bores out. With them, I am insured against being thought a bore myself, which I think I often am.
Of course, the true bore, like the true eccentric, doesn’t know or even suspect that that is what he is. The eccentric does strange things because to him they are the most natural things in the world to do. The true bore doesn’t know that he is boring others because what he says is so very interesting to himself, which is why at dinner parties my wife sometimes has to kick me under the table.
My problem is that I have two modes of socializing: to be silent or boring. I cannot make small talk, for when I try to do so my words turn to dust in my mouth, as it were, before I have even uttered them. I can talk only on matters of impersonal interest.
My problem is that I am a serial monomaniac, with one subject occupying the foreground of my mind for up to a few months. In the midst of my enthusiasm, I cannot imagine that other people are not as fascinated by the subject as I. The subject of my monomanias are various: Haitian history; the disappearance of the cuckoo from the English countryside; the life of Caradoc Evans, the Welsh writer of the early part of the 20th century; etc. I never stick with anything long enough to be a scholar of it.
When my wife kicks me under the table, it is usually in mid-anecdote. I cannot stop straightaway, abruptly, for that would look peculiar, as if I were having a fit or a stroke. But I have to bring it to a quicker end than I had anticipated, omitting details that to me had seemed choice and amusing. Often, I have to admit, my wife has heard them before.
Of course, I don’t agree that I am being, or have ever been, boring. Bores don’t know that they are boring, just as people with halitosis don’t know that their breath smells. I look at the people around the dinner table and think they are glued to what I am saying. The fact that I don’t really give them any alternative doesn’t occur to me. How, in any case, could anyone be uninterested in the story of le Roi Christophe who built, or had built, one of the wonders of the world, La Citadelle, near Cap-Haitien, or of how people threw bricks through Caradoc Evans’ windows, so disgusted were they by his literary portrayal of his countrymen? In those days, literature was important.
When my wife kicks me, I want to ask the other guests, “Am I being boring?” This is not a neutral question, however, a mere request for information. Generally people will go through agonies of ennui before they tell someone, “You are boring me,” just as they will not tell someone that he smells. I did once tell a patient who smelled so awfully that he made the corridor stink for two days after he had walked down it, but even then I had to pluck up my courage to tell him. After about three visits I said that henceforth I would have to see him in the hospital grounds, not indoors, upon which he naturally asked why.
“Because you smell so terribly,” I said.
He took it very well, I must say, and made efforts to clean himself up, but since he was enormously fat, had not cleaned himself for decades, and had many ravines in his body, his efforts were only partially and very gradually successful. What he really needed was industrial cleaners.
Can I do anything about the man next door? I fear not; there is no subtle sign I can give him, such as a kick under the table. Also, it would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I have, moreover, a sense of fellow feeling with him. We bores must stick together against the wits of the world. Earplugs, then, are the only answer, but only partial, for his deep rumbling voice still penetrates, like the approach of a goods train that is so long that it never goes by.
GSTAAD—Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth. (The prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, if I say so myself.) Funny thing is, I’ve never been able to be there when it counts. I missed my daughter’s birth because I was playing tennis in Palm Beach and got to the Bagel ten minutes too late. (She rarely forgets to mention it.) I missed my boy’s because I went back to sleep and Alexandra chose not to wake me. Taki and Maria were born in Rome, and Antonius and Theodora in Salzburg. This makes children and grandchildren 6, yours truly 0. Nothing to be proud of but I make up for it.
For example: After my father died I instructed the household to always refer to my person as the GP. GP did not stand for general practitioner, nor for great pretender, but for great provider. The children howled in laughter and mock anger, but the great provider endured as my name until the kids grew up. Then the great provider became the great pest. Now that I have turned everything over to them and the wife I am the great pain. Lolly has three residences, JT has four, and poor little me is down to two, both in the name of the wife. What I need is a GP, as in a great psychoanalyst.
Never mind. Up here in the Alps all I hear is ding-dong all day as the cows that surround me bask peacefully in the surrounding fields. The weather has been sunny and breezy, and I exercise all day. How ironic this is. When I was young and competing at a high level in various sports, I was always out of shape from drinking, chasing, and staying up late. Now, with one foot in the grave, I’m in the best shape of my life and looking forward to meeting the man in the white suit while in excellent trim. The lockdown is good for one’s health and very bad for one’s social life.
Perhaps it sounds stuffy, but reading Susan Hill’s column in the brilliant 10,000th issue of The Spectator got me going. It was about manners, or lack of nowadays. What I miss most are the good old days when manners were exquisite. Good manners are very simple to define: It means putting other people before yourself without thinking about it. Actually, Christianity is good manners. We are now in the age of the f-bomb, and in the power of the halfwit elite. The absolute dirt emanating from the TV channels, with movies and TV shows of coarse people using the coarsest language possible, makes viewing anything filmed over the past twenty years unbearable. People speaking without using the f-word are always depicted as bigots, whereas those using the most degrading of words and actions are shown in a favorable light.
Now, I’m no virgin shocked, shocked at discovering strong language and even violence. I’ve covered a few wars, gambled with some pretty lowlifes, and hung out with tough hombres who doubled as bouncers in clubs that are not exactly located in St. James’s. But what appears on screen nowadays truly shocks me. How did we get to this point? Why are we allowing those who are supposed to entertain us to bring us down to a level that would surprise even hoodlums of old? In fact why have we allowed ourselves to be brought down to the level of the hoodlum?
Edmund Burke insisted that manners are more important than laws, but I wonder how many of today’s TV producers or Hollywood biggies have ever heard of him. The race is on to push the boundaries, to promote “edge,” to break taboos. Yet these untalented and coarse individuals are the first to shout fire and impose a political agenda on anyone like the poor little Greek boy when I write something politically incorrect. I predict that these ruffians will one day soon deem good manners politically incorrect, just as they did in Orwell’s 1984.
Music, movies, and books follow trends, they do not set them. Bleeding American hearts of the ’60s salivated at ghetto language. (Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers.) Hollywood and the mainstream media cast the military and cops as the baddies. A diet of anti-cop, anti-family, anti-church followed, along with a diet of smut and porn.
Fifty years later my children and grandchildren are condemned to a Hollywood view of the world, a world that talks the way they used to at Muriel’s during Jeff Bernard’s heyday—night, rather. But those lowlifes at Muriel’s had talent galore; some even had names like Bacon. Today’s trendsetters have nothing but vulgarity.
In the meantime, the two-day-old Theodora, I am told, has my mother’s hands, very beautiful ones, and she’s as elegant as a two-day-old baby can be. Born on the same day as Andrew Neil, six days after The Spectator’s sainted editor, and a day before my buddy the Duke of Beaufort. I celebrate by watching black-and-white films of yesterday on Moving Pictures, and am in love again with Valerie Hobson, a lady I never met whom the uxorious Simon Heffer recently wrote beautifully about. Oh, how I suffer. Every Friday evening I drown my sorrows with exactly one bottle of very good claret followed by three-quarters of a vodka or whiskey bottle. Heaven.
George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed Monday night after an incident that involved four Minneapolis police officers, who have since been fired. Video footage recorded by a bystander shows officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck as Floyd gasps for breath on the ground with his face against the pavement. The officer does not move for at least eight minutes, even after Floyd stops speaking and moving. Police had responded to an alleged forgery taking place. A man matching Floyd’s description allegedly used a counterfeit bill.
In response, there has been rioting and looting throughout Minneapolis. Social media users posted videos on Twitter Wednesday night that showed burning businesses and looters entering a local Target store and making their way out with bags full of items. Protesters threw objects including water bottles and rocks at police and firefighters during a fire that was started at AutoZone.
Near the 3rd Precinct, a Cub Foods, a liquor store, a Dollar Tree, and an auto-parts store all showed signs of damage and looting. Fire erupted in the auto-parts store, and city fire crews battled the flames. Protesters set other fires in the street and at an under-construction housing complex.
Vandalism, looting, and fires also occurred in the Uptown area. Businesses damaged include a Hi-Lake Liquors and the Apple Store.
A man was found fatally shot Wednesday night near a pawnshop. Asked to confirm reports that he had been shot by a store owner, police spokesman John Elder said that was “one of the theories.”
Joe Biden has called Floyd’s death a “tragic reminder that this was not an isolated incident, but a part of an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice that still exists in this country.” But though Floyd’s death is certainly tragic and unjust, there’s no evidence of “an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice” against blacks in this country. Biden’s words, if they serve any purpose, will be to excuse the mob rule that has occurred in response to Floyd’s death. And needless to say, there’s no justification for rioting or looting because of Floyd’s death.
Police chief Medaria Arradondo told the local Fox 9 TV station that he ordered the use of teargas after violence and looting. He said that he is committed to protecting the rights of people to demonstrate and most did so peacefully, but there have been groups committing criminal acts.
“Justice historically has never come to fruition through some of the acts that we’re seeing tonight, whether it’s the looting, whether it’s the damage of property and other things,” Arradondo said in the Fox interview.
Protesters also gathered Wednesday night at the suburban home of Derek Chauvin as well as the Minneapolis home of Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County prosecutor who would make a charging decision in the case. No violence was reported in those protests.
In another example of racial tension and mob rule, there is the fate of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called police on a black man in Central Park during an encounter involving her unleashed dog. Amy Cooper was walking her dog Monday morning while Christian Cooper (no relation) was bird-watching at a wooded area of Central Park called the Ramble. They both claim their dispute began because her dog was not on a leash, contrary to the Ramble’s rules.
Christian Cooper recorded video of part of their encounter and posted it on Facebook, where it has since been shared thousands of times and became a trending topic on Twitter.
“I’m taking a picture and calling the cops,” Amy Cooper says in the video. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” But no such threat was made. It was all in her head.
In comments to CNN as the video spread widely, Amy Cooper said she wanted to “publicly apologize to everyone.” “I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way,” she said, adding that she also didn’t mean any harm to the African-American community.
Still, Cooper was fired from her job at an investment management company on Tuesday. After an internal review, Franklin Templeton said it “made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately.” “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton,” the company added.
Even more strange, in a Facebook post, Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniel Rescue, Inc. wrote that “the owner has voluntarily surrendered the dog in question to our rescue while this matter is being addressed.” Apparently, the “racist” woman is not fit to care for the dog!
It would be difficult to imagine more absurd circumstances than Amy Cooper’s. The woman was fired over a trivial private encounter that didn’t concern her performance in the workplace. And it’s doubtful that Franklin Templeton really cared about the issue of racism; most likely, they just wanted to protect their image, and thereby the company’s bottom line. However, our age of social media readily promotes just this sort of cheap thing. Immediately, Amy Cooper was made into a “Karen,” that is, an entitled white woman who calls the police for no reason. And while she may have been just that in regard to Christian Cooper, hers remains an unjust fate, for there is no proportion between her bad behavior and her firing, or the loss of her dog.
Of course, however, mob rule is not meant to be fair or rational. It aims to punish, as in the Amy Cooper example, or to allow people to vent their resentments and realize their passions and prejudices, as in the rioting and looting example. The death of George Floyd is certainly a great moral evil. But while people are rightly angry about it, they are not justified in vandalizing or taking goods from stores. Inevitably destructive, mob rule is no substitute for the rule of law, which alone can provide justice in Floyd’s case.
We’re all going crazy and running out of things to do during this endless shutdown. We’ve painted the dog, counted pavers in the backyard, and rearranged the spice rack alphabetically and also by color. What we really need right now is a new game!
Herewith I present the Quarantine Game that I, Ann Coulter, have invented.
The rules are simple. Imagine you’re the Democratic Party. You have a stellar opportunity to win the White House and also ensure that the opposition party never regains it as long as Homo sapiens walks the Earth.
But in a series of developments too bizarre to recall (have they finished counting the ballots in Iowa yet?), you find yourself stuck with a 77-year-old candidate whose campaign is causing no excitement anywhere in the land, even in his own brain — although, in fairness, Joe Biden is unaware that he’s running for president.
You have 12 minutes to come up with at least two (2) answers to this question: What can you do to get your party out of this mess?
Answers will be scored on rationale, probability and advantages.
Think about it. Your opposition is Donald Trump. For all the reasons Republicans salivated over running against Hillary — she was a repugnant human being, her every calculation was based on what was good for her and her family, scandals broke out whenever she was around, half the country already hated her — you are salivating looking at Trump.
Lest we forget, in Donald Trump the Democrats have a man [partial list] …
— who got into office and, the moment two people raised an objection to his fulfilling his campaign promises, said, OK, never mind! I’ll just tell my supporters I did it;
— who is more likely to adopt policy proposals from Kim Kardashian than the Angel Moms;
— who claimed to support gun rights, then mocked the NRA from the White House, while calling for absurd gun control measures (“take the guns first, go through due process second”);
— who won the presidency with zero Wall Street money, then immediately turned the keys of the kingdom over to Wall Street;
— who thinks his daughter, whose only skill is designing shoes (allegedly — businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-accused-of-copying-shoe-designs-2017-6), is the perfect person to sit at a table with world leaders, including the German chancellor and British prime minister;
— who brings a special counsel on himself by going on Lester Holt’s show and seemingly announcing it was his decision to fire the FBI director because of the Russia investigation — then blames Jeff Sessions;
— who created a fake Time magazine cover featuring himself to hang on the walls of his golf clubs (“DONALD TRUMP: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!”);
— who tweets Michael Moore conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough killing his intern;
— who is a very coarse and vulgar person — which could all be forgiven if only he had the little voice in his head that said No, I owe these people. I promised them. I’ll pick up the phone and call congressional Republicans.
So. Democrats have a real opportunity here. But again, you’re stuck with Biden.
When I played the Quarantine Game, here were my answers:
1) Replace Biden and [unnamed female vice presidential candidate] with Corey Booker and Kamala Harris.
Rationale: After hearing every six minutes on MSNBC that “the black vote is not monolithic!” apparently African Americans agreed this ONE TIME to make an exception and vote monolithically for Joe Biden.
Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina said, We’re all voting for Biden, and black voters said, Yep, OK, done.
Even in normal circumstances, the Democrats are a little too beholden to the Al Sharptons of the party. But after black voters hauled the creaky, hole-filled Biden campaign cratered at the bottom of the sea to the surface for some quick repairs, there had better be an African American on the ticket.
How about two black Democrats?
Likelihood: I am sublimely confident that if the Democrats think they are going to lose with Biden and get four more years of Trump, they’ll make the switch. Ask Robert Torricelli.
Advantages: With two black candidates on the ticket, the media won’t have to whip up fake racist incidents like Ferguson to keep black voters interested. Together, Booker and Harris might even be able to stage a “Sister Souljah” moment to reassure backsliding white Democrats.
2) Don’t let the voters see Biden.
Rationale: Have you seen Biden?
Likelihood: Have you seen Biden?
Advantages: It’s easy! Go all Kim Jong Un. We’ll call it the Kim Jong Joe Plan. Keep Biden in the bunker, and get a body double to do all his TV interviews and public appearances. With Biden wearing a black mask these days, all they’ll need are the hair plugs.
The Coolidge effect is known as man’s general desire to copulate with every desirable female (why not vice versa?). On one occasion President Calvin Coolidge and his wife visited a poultry farm. The first lady watched the rooster ride a hen and was interested in the frequency of the relations.
“Ah, madam, dozens of times!” the farmer replied.
“Please tell the president,” she said jokingly.
The aforementioned asked in turn:
“And does the rooster always do it with the same hen?”
“No, Mr. President,” replied the farmer, “he does it each time with a different female.”
“Please tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” suggested the president.
I found this illuminating anecdote in Homo Erectus, by Juan Eslava Galán. Monogamy can be the comfort of those who see their scope limited. Unless you are a Mata Hari or a Don Juan and irresistibly master the art of seduction, you will have no choice but to pay in some way if variety is what you want in bed.
The millionaire sex market comes to my mind when reading that the very liberal Sweden had its biggest sensual raid while the rest of the world sublimated their sexual desires under house arrest. Last week in Stockholm, 28 citizens were arrested for aspiring to sexual services of one kind or another, a record for the capital of the Viking country. It is curious that a land so advanced in respecting individual freedom when dealing with a pandemic is so intransigent regarding the oldest profession in the world.
In Sweden, prostitutes are very expensive. The client risks fines much higher than what a top madam will charge. And they are working in a law that will sentence those who pay for sexual services to prison, whether in their own land or abroad.
Sounds good to me if your goal is to fight the white slave trade. Sexual slavery is aberrant, but if we look at the human condition, prostitution can also be voluntary as a means of obtaining extramarital pleasures or income above the average salary.
Or have the Swedes never heard of Messalina? The very powerful wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, mother of Caligula, liked to go down to the sinful neighborhood of her time for pleasure. On one occasion Messalina challenged the whores of Rome to see who could hold out the longest in a classic gang bang. The whores named their champion, a Sicilian named Scylla (like the famous Messina Straits, capable of swallowing entire ships). Well, Scylla had 25 clients while Messalina managed to deal with 70 according to some and 200 according to others.
Since the time of sacred prostitution in the temples of Ishtar, many have not wanted to understand the usefulness of brothels and puritanically demand their closure. They do not realize that there are men and women who decide to sell their bodies happily rather than being enslaved in an office, where they sell their souls for promotion.
Many people think, like the comedian, that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.
Pragmatic Germany has 3,000 legal brothels and an estimated 600,000 sex workers, unionized with cards that pass mandatory medical checks. Their market value is higher than Siemens and Volkswagen combined!
In Catholic Austria you will find some of the best brothels in the world. And they are accepted very naturally. Although, I know of some fierce hunters’ wives who closed a brothel in the center of their small town. But that was an extreme case, because in the long Alpine winter, women do not want to share their husband with any other.
There are associations of Spanish prostitutes who demand to be streamlined, pay taxes, and collect the welfare state pension currently in crisis. They further allege that it would be a severe blow against the white slave trade. You have to fight much more forcefully against trafficking and the enslaving mafias, of course, but why tear your hair out if someone wants to rent their body for a while?
After all, prostitution is very widespread. Politics show impressive degeneration, something that is much more scandalous than any carnal transaction. People are often prepared to sell themselves continuously, and social climbers even sell themselves for free. Whores dominate the pubic scene—sorry, I mean public.
Is the world a theater or a huge brothel? Ask a Swede!
(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.)
El Burdel Global
El efecto Coolidge se conoce como el deseo general del macho para copular con toda hembra deseable (¿y viceversa?). En una ocasión el presidente Calvin Coolidge y su mujer visitaron una granja avícola. La primera dama observó cómo el gallo montaba una gallina y se interesó por la frecuencia de las relaciones.
—¡Ah, señora, docenas de veces! –respondió el granjero.
—Por favor, dígaselo al presidente –dijo ella medio en broma.
El aludido preguntó a su vez:
—¿Y siempre lo hace con la misma gallina?
—No, señor presidente –respondió el granjero—, lo hace cada vez con una hembra distinta.
—Por favor, dígaselo a mi señora –sugirió el presidente.
He encontrado anécdota tan esclarecedora en el libro Homo Erectus, de Juan Eslava Galán. La monogamia puede ser el consuelo de los que observan limitado su campo de acción. A no ser de que seas una Mata Hari o un Don Juan y domines el arte de la seducción de manera irresistible, no tendrás más remedio que pagar de alguna manera si quieres variedad en el catre.
Y el millonario mercado del sexo me viene a la cabeza al leer que la muy liberal Suecia vivió su mayor redada sensual mientras el resto del mundo sublimaba sus deseos sexuales en arresto domiciliario. La pasada semana, en Estocolmo, detuvieron a 28 ciudadanos por aspirar a servicios sexuales de una y otra índole, todo un record para la capital del país vikingo. Resulta curioso que una tierra tan avanzada en respetar la libertad individual a la hora de lidiar con una pandemia, sea tan intransigente respecto al oficio más viejo del mundo.
En Suecia irse de putas cuesta carísimo. El cliente se arriesga a unas multas muy superiores al costo de la madame más selecta. Y tienen un proyecto de ley que condenará a la cárcel a los que pagan por servicios sexuales, ya sea en sus dominios o en el extranjero.
Me parece bien si su objetivo es luchar contra la trata de blancas. La esclavitud sexual es aberrante, pero, si atendemos a la condición humana, la prostitución también puede ser voluntaria como medio de obtener placeres extraconyugales o ingresos superiores al salario medio.
¿O es que en Suecia jamás oyeron hablar de Mesalina? La muy poderosa mujer del emperador romano Claudio, madre de Calígula, gustaba bajar por placer al barrio pecaminoso de su época. En una ocasión Mesalina retó a las putas de Roma para ver quién aguantaba más en un clásico gang bang. Las putas designaron a su campeona, una siciliana de nombre Escila (como el famoso remolino del estrecho de Messina, capaz de tragarse barcos enteros). Pues bien, Escila estuvo con 25 clientes mientras que Mesalina consiguió trajinarse a 70 según unos y 200 según otros.
Desde los tiempos de la prostitución sagrada en los templos de Ishtar muchas no quieren entender la utilidad de los burdeles y exigen puritanamente su cierre. No se dan cuenta que hay hombres y mujeres que deciden vender su carne alegremente antes que esclavizarse laboralmente en una oficina donde venden el alma por promocionarse.
Como dijo una vez un comediante: “El sexo es una de las cosas más bonitas, naturales y gratificantes que pueden comprarse con dinero”.
La pragmática Alemania cuenta tres mil burdeles absolutamente legales y estima seiscientas mil trabajadoras del sexo, sindicadas con carné que pasan controles médicos obligatorios. ¡Eso son más cotizantes que Siemens y Volkswagen juntos!
En la católica Austria se encuentran algunos de los mejores burdeles del mundo. Y se aceptan con gran naturalidad. Aunque sé de unas indómitas mujeres de aguerridos cazadores que cerraron un lupanar en el centro de su pequeño pueblo. Pero ese era un caso extremo, pues en el largo invierno alpino las mujeres no quieren compartir a su marido con ninguna otra.
Existen asociaciones de prostitutas españolas que exigen su regularización, pagar impuestos y cobrar la pensión del estado de bienestar actualmente en crisis. Alegan además que sería un duro golpe contra la trata de blancas. Hay que luchar mucho más contundentemente contra la trata y las mafias que esclavizan, por supuesto, pero no hay que rasgarse las vestiduras si alguien quiere alquilar su cuerpo por un rato.
Al fin y al cabo la prostitución está de lo más extendida. La política muestra un emputecimiento impresionante, algo que resulta mucho más escandaloso que cualquier transacción carnal. Demasiada gente se vende continuamente y los trepas hasta se ofrecen gratis. Putas y putos dominan la escena púbica, perdón, quiero decir pública.
¿Es el mundo un teatro o un inmenso burdel? Explíquenselo a un sueco.
Opinion journalism in the respectable outlets has increasingly come to be dominated during the Great Awokening of the past half-dozen years by young Women of Color with soft major degrees who take whatever topic is in the news—global pandemic, Ukrainegate impeachment, a tribal elder being smirked at—and relate it to how society must learn to idolize more the beauty of women such as, to take a random example, themselves. Also, they tend to be extreme antiquarians who don’t seem to be cognizant of any history since the end of Jim Crow or even of slavery.
Perhaps the funniest example of this long-running trend appeared in The New York Times on Memorial Day when sociologist Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, weighed in with:
It’s Not Obesity. It’s Slavery.
We know why Covid-19 is killing so many black people.
To prove her hypothesis, she recounts her experience as “the only black person in the room” (a repetitious trope in this school of op-edizing) when she explained to public health experts why black people are sick:
My answer was swift and unequivocal:
“Slavery.”
Well, there you go.
Professor Strings went on to explain:
The era of slavery was when white Americans determined that black Americans needed only the bare necessities, not enough to keep them optimally safe and healthy. It set in motion black people’s diminished access to healthy foods, safe working conditions, medical treatment and a host of other social inequities that negatively impact health.
And that’s why African-Americans are so weak and puny today. For example, only 29 of the 32 first-round picks in the 2020 National Football League draft were black. If blacks weren’t still so malnourished from their slavery days, they would have made up 33 of the first 32 selected.
That’s just The Science.
The important thing in this school of op-edery is that you never, ever attribute any black health problems to black tendencies toward obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, or the like. It’s all slavery. And redlining:
In a recent essay addressing Covid-19 specifically, Rashawn Ray underscored the legacy of redlining that pushed black people into poor, densely populated communities often with limited access to health care.
In reality (and reality is rather important at present), coronavirus tends to kill the old, the obese, and the sickly. America, like Britain, though, has a lot of citizens who aren’t in the best of shape, so somewhat more middle-aged people have died here than in Italy, where the infection spread widest in some quite fit towns in the foothills of the Alps and hence almost only the very old died.
Here in the U.S. 19.3% of official coronavirus deaths have been under 65 and 40.3% under 75. The median age of the deceased has been around 70, compared with 79 in Italy.
However, hospitalizations (and you really would rather not be hospitalized with this unpleasant disease) have been spread more broadly, with well under half the hospitalized patients being under 65. Fortunately, the younger have been more likely to emerge from the hospital alive.
Among those hospitalized in the U.S., obesity was the second-most-common accompanying condition, with 49.5 percent being fat, second only to hypertension at 58.6 percent.
On the other hand, large numbers of Americans in general suffer from these problems. For instance, in 2018 45 percent of all American adults and 75 percent of those over 60 were diagnosed with hypertension (which has recently been redefined down from having blood pressure of 140 over 90 to 130 over 80).
Hypertension (and the like) is often referred to as a “comorbidity,” which is widely misunderstood to mean something like “another cause of death” because the adjective “morbid” is commonly used to refer to death-related Halloween subjects such as skeletons and graves. Until very recently, I had assumed that “mortality” and “morbidity” both referred to death, but instead “morbidity” merely refers to the condition of having an ailment, with no implication that it will prove lethal.
So, references to the broad presence of “comorbidities” in those hospitalized or dead from coronavirus have tended to mislead many of us not familiar with the technical use of the term into thinking that the only patients at risk from the novel disease are people who were on death’s door already.
On the other hand, raw death totals from coronavirus tend to exaggerate its impact since it targets the old so much more than, say, 20th-century polio epidemics, which, while they never killed more than 3,145 in one year, picked on the young and often left survivors crippled for life.
Unfortunately, we can only guess at this point about how many survivors of coronavirus will suffer long-term problems. If we are unlucky we may lose more Disability-Adjusted Life Years among those who live than among those who die. Alternatively, we may realize we spent too much saving people who had already lived a long life.
Time will tell.
Professor Strings is irate that anybody might dare mention black obesity (or, as she puts it, “obesity”) as a contributing factor to high black death rates:
This message is particularly important in a moment when African-Americans have experienced the highest rates of severe complications and death from the coronavirus and “obesity” has surfaced as an explanation. The cultural narrative that black people’s weight is a harbinger of disease and death has long served as a dangerous distraction from the real sources of inequality, and it’s happening again.
In Fearing the Black Body, the author discerns:
This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago…. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist.
Dr. Strings is herself elegantly slender, which makes her an ideal media warrioress against racist fat phobia, not being much weighed down by her own topic of expertise.
So, how obese are African-Americans in reality?
Black men aren’t that fat…at least not by contemporary American standards, which are less than ideal.
The federal government periodically measures a representative sample of Americans so clothing vendors can figure out which sizes to stock. In their 2015–16 report, the average black man weighed 198 pounds and stood 5′ 9.1″ tall versus 202 pounds and 5′ 9.8″ for the average white man.
So we can call that roughly a tie in fatness.
In contrast, white women averaged 5′ 4.3″ and 170 pounds while black women were 5′ 4.1″ and 190 pounds. (Asian-American women were 5′ 1.5″ and 132 pounds, while Mexican-American women were also 5′ 1.5″ but 172 pounds.)
So, black women tend to weigh about 20 pounds more than white women. In America’s distant segregated past, that wasn’t much of a burden for black women in competing for black men, since whites were off-limits. But in an era that despises racial segregation, which means that black women have to compete in the mating marketplace with other races, this extra average weight is an encumbrance.
Not surprisingly, female academics like to theorize that because, they assume, sexual attraction is wholly socially constructed (Foucault, 1975), they can simply hector society into finding their race hotter-looking.
Nobody has yet tested whether this popular assumption is true or not, but why bother? This faith is a steady source of topics for publish-or-perish articles.
In our unfortunately very real world, why do blacks tend to be somewhat harder hit by coronavirus?
For one thing, obviously, they tend to be more gregarious than other races, which is not a bad trait except during an epidemic spread largely by getting up close and personal with other people.
For another, blacks aren’t on average as persnickety about obeying rules, such as “Maintain a Six-Foot Distance” or “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
Are there biological differences contributing to the greater coronavirus distress of blacks?
Perhaps. Movie mogul Tyler Perry is campaigning to persuade his fellow blacks to boost their vitamin D levels by getting out in the sun more or taking supplements. It’s not proven yet that vitamin D deficiencies are related to the new disease, but it’s not implausible, either.
Because blacks evolved at tropical latitudes, they tend to be deficient in vitamin D when they live as far north as New York or Detroit. Perry argues:
Because we are African American people, we are naturally deficient because of the melanin in our skin, it blocks out vitamin D. And for the most part—not all of us—but, a lot of us just don’t like being in the sun and that’s where vitamin D comes from.
In general, however, I’m not yet much interested in trying to figure out the role, if any, of human biodiversity in this new pandemic. Granted, we’ll probably eventually find that certain racial groups were more susceptible and others less so. But trying to predict which ahead of time has been a fool’s errand so far: The virus is novel, so how it interacts with human genetic diversity is bafflingly difficult to predict.
Ironically, my attitude toward the new virus on Nature vs. Nurture questions is much like those of many intelligent people I’ve encountered who assume that my views on race differences in test scores or running ability must be based on ignorance and if they only spend ten minutes thinking about it, they’ll surely figure out an explanation I’ve never heard of before.
In reality, of course, I’ve spent almost half a century thinking about these questions and accumulating a vast trove of data about them, so I never lose these arguments.
But nobody has been thinking about COVID-19 since 1972, so top-of-the-head theorizing about which people are most vulnerable is likely to be self-serving and wrong.
Similarly, I’m rather reluctant to posit viral genetic diversity as a cause of the many disparities we see in the rates of infection and lethality in different locales. Sure, you could explain a lot about death tolls by assuming that, say, Italy and New York City were hit by a particularly dangerous mutant version, while Austria and Florida are home to a more benign strain. But by assuming unproven differences in nature, you could explain away results that should be attracting your attention to differences in nurture.
You can do something about nurture a lot faster than you can do anything about nature, which those of us who don’t object to nature explanations on political grounds should still keep in mind.
For example, the governors of New York and Florida made contrasting decisions on the seemingly obscure policy question of which institutions to prioritize: hospitals or nursing homes. Andrew Cuomo chose, not all that unreasonably at the time considering what he was being advised by apparent experts, to do everything possible to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, including off-loading possibly still-infectious patients to nursing homes.
But it turned out, to the surprise of most apparent whiz kids, that skilled labor-intensive ventilators weren’t very helpful at saving lives, and the demand for medical services from non-coronavirus patients largely vanished over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who was much criticized over his slowness to shut the beaches, made what turned out to be the crucial right call: to use hospitals to isolate the infected away from nursing homes.
But if you had assumed that the high death toll in New York and the light impact in Florida were simply due to undiscovered genetic differences between either the viruses or the people of the two states, you’d lack incentive to notice that the different paths chosen turned out to be a matter of life or death.
That’s why questions of nature vs. nurture remain the big leagues for intellectuals.
Is the U.S. up for a second Cold War — this time with China?
What makes the question newly relevant is that Xi Jinping’s China suddenly appears eager for a showdown with the United States for long-term supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and the world.
With the U.S. consumed by the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 100,000 Americans and crashed our economy to depths not seen since the Great Depression, China’s dictator seems to be making his move.
At the Communist Party conclave this May, China announced that it was seizing control of Hong Kong’s security. From now on, subversion, sedition, secession and foreign meddling within the city will be crushed.
Whatever sanctions the U.S. and its allies impose, there will be no free and independent Hong Kong.
“For an Ascendant China, Reining in Hong Kong Is Just the Start,” is the headline over The New York Times story on China’s new assertiveness.
“China’s move to strip away another layer of Hong Kong’s autonomy was not a rash impulse. It was a deliberate act, months in the making,” writes reporter Steven Lee Myers. “It took into account the risks of international umbrage and reached the reasonable assumption that there would not be a significant geopolitical price to pay. …
“With the world distracted by the pandemic’s devastating toll, China has taken a series of aggressive steps in recent weeks to flex its economic, diplomatic and military muscle across the region.
“China’s Coast Guard rammed and sank a fishing boat in disputed waters off Vietnam, and its ships swarmed an offshore oil rig operated by Malaysia. Beijing denounced the second inauguration of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, and pointedly dropped the word peaceful from its annual call for unification with the island democracy.
“Chinese troops squared off again last week with India’s along their contentious border in the Himalayas.”
To warnings that China is risking Cold War II, Beijing seems to be responding: If a Cold War with the United States is the price of securing our strategic interests and position in Asia and the world, bring it on.
Beijing has put the ball in America’s court. What do we do now?
Consider the list of nations with which China has territorial quarrels that have lately produced military clashes.
Beijing claims Indian lands China has occupied since their 1962 war.
China claims virtually all the islets and reefs in the South China Sea and now uses naval vessels to deal with the rival claimants of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Beijing asserts that Taiwan and all of its offshore islands in the East China Sea belong to China. While the Senkaku Islands have long been controlled by Japan, China claims these islands as well.
As for protests of the suppression of Tibetans and incarceration in concentration camps of Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs, Beijing brushes them off.
Should the U.S. seek sanctions on China if it crushes the resistance in Hong Kong, how many U.S. allies would support those sanctions, when, for Australia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, China, not America, is their largest market and trading partner?
How did we allow ourselves to get into this position where a lately backward China is suddenly a greater rival for global hegemony than was the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev?
Said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ruefully this month:
“China’s been ruled by a brutal, authoritarian regime, a communist regime since 1949. For several decades, we thought the regime would become more like us through trade, scientific exchanges, diplomatic outreach … (but) that didn’t happen.
“We greatly underestimated the degree to which Beijing is ideologically and politically hostile to free nations. The whole world is waking up to that fact.”
Yet, the rising totalitarian power of China, even with its imperial ambitions undisguised, does not threaten the vital interests of the United States.
So, again, the question: If China is prepared for a Cold War II with the United States to establish its predominance, what are we prepared to do should China absorb Hong Kong and convert it into a second Shanghai?
What are we prepared to do if China puts new pressure on Taiwan and seizes offshore islands in the East China Sea, as she did in the South China Sea? Sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia to compel it to return Crimea and vacate eastern Ukraine have conspicuously failed.
Are we prepared to fight for any of the islands, none of which we claim and many of which we agree ultimately belong to Beijing?
The Chinese have stolen our intellectual property, coerced technology transfers from our businesses and sent spies posing as students into our universities to thieve our secrets.
Meanwhile, we allowed ourselves to become dependent on China for medicines and drugs vital to the health and the survival of millions of Americans.
Who did this to us? We did it to ourselves.
In May 1940, Hitler and Himmler were having one of their little slumber-party bull sessions, exchanging gossipy notes like schoolgirls. Himmler gave his Führer a memo titled “Treatment of Alien Races in the East” (“like, errmagerd, those Kashubs are so gross!”). The gist of the memo was that under German control, the ethnic minorities of the Eastern territories will be kept subservient, uneducated, and supervised. Jews will be expelled and “the ethnic concepts of Ukrainians, Gorals and Lemcos will disappear” by nonlethal means, because Himmler dismissed the notion of “physical extermination” as “un-German and Bolshevist.”
Hitler replied that Himmler’s take on the situation was “very good and correct.”
The H Twins recognized “physical extermination” as a taboo, a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Stalin had crossed that line, and no one wants to be like Stalin, right?
Wrong. A year later, Hitler & Himmler reversed their stance. The mass murder of male adult Russian Jews began in the weeks following Barbarossa. It soon expanded to include female adult Russian Jews. At the time, however, the “aktion” was limited in scope and geography.
Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppe B, was killing Jews left and right that summer of ’41. But he had misgivings, not about the killing, but about the feasibility of continuing the killing once the area was pacified. There’ll have to be a better solution than murder for the remaining Jews, he mused in a July 25, 1941, memo. There are too many of them in Belarus to kill. Mass deportation, Nebe noted, would be the only viable method of cleansing.
Some months later, Wilhelm Kube, generalkommissar of Belarus, voiced his own apprehensions regarding the Jews being sent to Minsk from the Reich. Yes, Kube confirmed, the Russian Jews needed to be killed; no dispute there. But the German and Austrian Jews being sent east were of “Germanic blood.” They looked, spoke, and acted German; some had even fought for Germany in WWI. They were, as Kube noted in December 1941, “of our kulturkreis,” unlike the “bestial native hordes.” Kill the Slavic Jews, sure. But hands off the ones that share our DNA!
Himmler and Hitler had initially rejected physical extermination on moral grounds (“It shouldn’t be done to anyone”). Nebe rejected it on practical grounds (“It can’t be done”). And Kube rejected it on sentimental grounds (“It shouldn’t be done to kin”). But by the middle of 1942, all four had changed their tune (for a thorough examination of why, I recommend a book by a tiny Jew named David). Physical extermination of the Jews of Poland and Russia (and the Reich Jews in Minsk) became the accepted solution.
The Nazis did not go into World War II planning to break that taboo. They were hesitant, in fact, and that’s the point. They knew there was a taboo, they knew there was a line, and their first instinct was not to cross it. But eventually they did, and we have to ask ourselves, what did they gain? Did they win the war? In fact, not only did they not win, but Himmler would rather sheepishly concede in 1944 that they’d made a major oopsie by killing so many Jews in 1942 that they now needed to import Jews from Hungary to fill the labor vacuum left by the mass killings.
That line-crossing will most likely haunt Germany until the end of time. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it’s fact. Say what you will about the exaggerations and unfounded claims associated with Holocaust history, and there are many, but the simple truth is, the Nazis did abandon their initial caution about “physical extermination,” and they paid the price. And generations of Germans have paid the price since. Germany as a nation continues to pay the price. That line-crossing profited no one at the time and has only caused harm since.
Here lieth the lesson for government officials and policy makers: Think carefully before crossing the lines that give reasonable men pause.
Now, some governments can not only cross but obliterate certain lines and totally get away with it. China’s a perfect example; the CCP has killed millions, and it keeps on killing. China gives hope to other dictators and demagogues. No tyrants, stormtroopers, or party functionaries commit transgressive acts expecting to end up swinging from a rope at a war-crimes trial, just like nobody robs a bank expecting to get caught. That’s just human nature.
The American politicians who’ve visited hell on this nation with the mass lockdowns, forced cessation of commerce, and eradication of livelihoods expect to get away with it. They envision a future for themselves in which they’re hailed as saviors, not condemned as monsters. Fifty years from now, they think they’ll be remembered as Mao is by Chinese communists, not as Hitler is by the world.
And if you think I’m comparing the lockdowns to the Holocaust, I am. Not in terms of loss of life, but in terms of a monumental line-crossing that can never be undone. The lockdowns have committed obscene violence against our rights and our Constitution. We are a changed people because of them. Yes, there have been previous mass infringements of liberties in the U.S., from Prohibition to Manzanar. But they always came down through channels. It’s telling that the same people who won’t allow a single Trump executive order to go into effect without running it past judge after judge after judge to test for “constitutionality” have suspended basic rights for a majority of Americans based on dubious proclamations from mayors and governors.
Funny how no one on the left wants to run the lockdown orders past a Hawaiian judge.
The most basic constitutional rights of worship and assembly (and other things the Founders didn’t think they’d have to enshrine, like the right to sit down and the right to leave one’s home barefaced) have been abrogated because some tin-pot state and local officials invoked the “cuz I sez so” rule. That’s a crossed line of dreadful magnitude. And just as with the Nazis, prior to crossing that line, the powers that be recognized the line, and respected it.
“Although the form of quarantine can vary, it always represents a significant deprivation of an individual’s liberty…. All other restraints on liberty undertaken in the name of public health are less restrictive (and often more effective) alternatives to quarantine…. In the nineteenth century, statutes did not require that any judicial order, nor any notice and hearing, accompany a quarantine…. Today, our jurisprudence is far more process-oriented.” That’s Northeastern University law professor Wendy Parmet back in 1985 assuring us that mass quarantines were outdated relics and besides, if they were ever tried in modern America, judges would have to sign off on them first.
I mean, it’s not like we’d ever leave that to mayors!
“Public health officials expect a U.S. quarantine today to almost always be voluntary, with incentives to cooperate.” That’s the AP from 2005, soothing us with the reassurance that any modern U.S. quarantine would of course be “voluntary.”
“We practice in this country quarantine every day. If a child gets the measles, their mothers are expected to keep them at home.” That was Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, also in 2005. He said no mass quarantine would ever be any worse than this: “Authorities first might urge people to watch football on TV instead of at the stadium, and to avoid shopping malls. Then schools might close for a while. Then people might be told to postpone holidays or business trips, all steps to stem transmission by minimizing contact—but well short of compulsory quarantine.”
“Well short” indeed. Compulsory mass quarantine would never be allowed!
From Biosecurity and Bioterrorism (a peer-reviewed journal of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), September 2006: “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”
Yes, let’s eliminate it from serious consideration. It could never happen here! And if that doesn’t put your worries to rest, allow Professor Michael Dorf of Cornell University Law School to set your mind even more at ease in this essay from 2014:
Government officials should not be permitted to issue quarantine orders without any judicial oversight. A person subject to quarantine—or given the numbers that could be involved, a class action representative suing on behalf of many people subject to quarantine—should be permitted to challenge the quarantine itself. Quarantine amounts to an extraordinarily serious limitation on liberty. Moreover, even a quarantine that is justified for purposes of preventing the spread of a disease to the general population can put the individuals subject to the quarantine at greater risk of becoming sick themselves—by concentrating them among others with a higher risk of being infected. Accordingly, judicial review of government officials’ claims that a quarantine is necessary to protect public health should not be a mere rubber stamp.
A rubber stamp? Hell, in 2020 we’d kill for a rubber stamp! We never even got that much.
“The authorities say they will never lump together those who are ill and others only thought to be exposed, as happened frequently in past quarantines.” That’s The New York Times in 2003 writing from the city where the governor just “lumped together those who are ill and others only thought to be exposed.”
“Quarantine is rarely employed because it may unnecessarily restrict liberty and may spread disease to quarantined persons who were not actually exposed.” That’s CDC-trained epidemiologist Harry Hull (at the time the state epidemiologist for Minnesota and New Mexico) in 2014 also writing about the “rarely employed” thing that was just mass-employed by a bunch of murderous governors.
So many promises, so many assurances. It’ll never happen here. And if it does, it’ll be voluntary. No compulsory mass quarantine; just eliminate that possibility from consideration! And even if someone were to try it, there’d be judicial oversight aplenty; thorough oversight, not just rubber-stamping. And the sick will never be confined with the healthy. I mean, what are we, morons? Monsters?
We knew what not to do. We knew what we shouldn’t do. And we transgressed.
Exactly 75 years ago to the day, the people of Germany ventured out into what remained of a once-thriving, powerful nation, as their deposed leaders, the ones who crossed the line they knew better than to cross, departed the world via their own hand or at the end of a rope.
We will not be so lucky. The people who brought us to ruin are still around, and still in charge.
And it’s going to take a lot of effort (more, I fear, than we may be willing or able to muster) to stop them from crossing that line again any damn time they see fit.
According to authorities, 20-year-old Armando Hernandez, Jr. walked into a shopping center in Glendale, AZ last Thursday and started randomly firing his semi-automatic rifle at people because he suffered from the “feeling that women don’t want him.”
Ed Leiter of Maricopa County Attorney’s Office told a judge on Thursday that Hernandez was a self-admitted “incel” (involuntary celibate) who was “deeply angered” by the fact that women rejected him and wished to make them “feel the pain he feels on a daily basis.” He said that Hernandez had been plotting a mass shooting for three or four years and wanted to shoot at least 10 people—primarily couples who appeared to have been engaged in happy sexual relationships. Hernandez only managed to critically injure one person before authorities subdued him.
The day before Hernandez’s rampage, Canadian authorities lodged terrorism charges against unnamed 17-year-old boy who is accused of walking into a Toronto “erotic massage parlor” on February 24 and stabbing one women to death before another woman wrestled his machete from him and stabbed him in the back, allowing police to arrest him at the scene.
According to a joint statement by the RMCP and Toronto police, the suspect “was inspired by the Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE) movement commonly known as INCEL.” It is thought to be the first time in history that terrorism charges have been lodged against an incel.
On February 24, 2020, the 17-year-old male—who is unnamed because he’s a minor—allegedly stabbed a female spa worker to death and attempted to kill her coworker at an erotic massage parlor in Toronto. The incident took place at the Crown Spa, which offers “sensual body rub” and “an exotic massage that will leave you feeling completely relaxed and spoiled senseless,” according to its website. At around noon on Monday, Feb. 24, the owner said she heard screams coming from a back room. When she went to see what was happening, a man stabbed her with a machete. She said she was able to wrestle the weapon from him and stab him in the back. Witnesses saw a bloodied woman and man emerge from the front door. The body of Ashley Noell Arzaga, 24, was found inside. An injured teenager was arrested at the scene. He had allegedly expressed familiarity with, and empathy for, mass-murdering incels Elliot Rodger (who killed six people and himself in a 2014 California rampage) and fellow Canadian Alek Minassian, who killed ten people after plowing his van through pedestrians on a sidewalk in 2018.
The state of Texas recently published a Domestic Terrorism Threat Assessment that stated:
The violence demonstrated by Incels in the past decade, coupled with extremely violent online rhetoric, suggests this particular threat could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types.
For all you hear about an alleged wave of white-supremacist terrorist killings in North America, it appears that the incels are currently stacking up more bodies than all the Nazis combined. Some estimate that since 2014, self-admitted incels and people whose social-media histories reveal extensive activity on incel forums have committed a minimum of seven mass murders that left 54 people dead.
In late April of this year, the FBI arrested 33-year-old Carl Bennington of Covina, CA on a cyberstalking charge for allegedly sending hundreds of rape and murder threats over the course of four years to women who’d rejected his sexual advances. They say he was an active commenter on incel message boards.
In May of 2019, 27-year-old Christopher Cleary of Denver, CO—who had previously pled guilty to two separate felony charges of threatening and harassing multiple women—received a prison sentence of up to five years for yet another direct violent threat. Cleary had posted the following on Facebook:
All I wanted was to be loved, yet no one cares about me I’m 27 years old and I’ve never had a girlfriend before and I’m still a virgin, this is why I’m planning on shooting up a public place soon and being the next mass shooter cause I’m ready to die and all the girls the turned me down is going to make it right by killing as many girls as I see.
Minutes after Alek Minassian plowed over those pedestrians in 2018, a message thought to have been written by Minassian appeared on Facebook praising Elliot Rodger and declaring that the “Incel rebellion has already begun!” After his arrest, Minassian told authorities he had previously communicated with Elliot Rodger and fellow incel mass-murderer Chris Harper-Mercer.
On November 2, 2018, Scott Beierle, a 40-year-old “odd loner and self-described misogynist” who had been arrested multiple times for groping women against their will, walked into a hot-yoga studio in Tallahassee, FL with a gun and killed two women before killing himself. He, too, had praised Elliot Rodger—the Patron Saint of Inceldom—and had hinted on a YouTube video that he would soon seek violent revenge for his lack of luck with the ladies:
The situation … of like not getting any — no love, no nothing, this endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration — that was me certainly as an adolescent….How do you respond when they, for whatever reason, collaborate to make the decision to attempt to tear somebody down?…I believe in karma. What comes around goes around, and those that engage in treachery ultimately will be the victims of it.
The February, 2018 mass murder at Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead was a national news story for weeks, with the narrative sculpted almost entirely around gun control. What received little mention is that shooter Nikolas Cruz had once posted that “Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.”
In December, 2017 in New Mexico, William Atchison walked into his former high school and killed two people before shooting himself. He had frequently praised Elliot Rodger and used the screen name “Elliot Rodger” on multiple online forums.
After Sheldon Bentley stomped a man to death in an Edmonton, AB alleyway in July 2016, he said at trial that he was frustrated because he hadn’t had sex with a woman in four years.
In October 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer murdered nine people and shot himself dead at a community-college campus in southern Oregon. He left his own manifesto at the crime scene praising Elliot Rodger and condemning black men for taking all the girls:
I have always been the most hated person in the world. Ever since I arrived in this world, I have been under siege from it.…My whole life has been one lonely enterprise. One loss after another. And here I am , 26, with no friends, no job, no girlfriend, a virgin. I long ago realized that society likes to deny people like me these things….I was once like you, a loser, rejected by society. When the girls would rather go with alpha thug black men, we can all agree that somethings wrong with the world. When good individuals like myself are alone, but wicked black men get the loot, like some sort of vaginal pirate, it’s not fair.
Ironically, he described himself as 40% black but as somehow exempt because his African genes came from his mother rather than some deadbeat black thug of a dad.
George Sodini of Pittsburgh, PA hosted a personal website which included the following statements:
Black dudes have thier [sic] choice of best white —-. You do the math, there are enough young white so all the brothers can each have one for 3 or 6 months or so….Moving into Christmas again. No girlfriend since 1984, last Christmas with Pam was in 1983. Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29). …. I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne – yet 30 million women rejected me – over an 18 or 25-year period. That is how I see it.
In August of 2009—at age 48 and by his own reckoning having gone 19 years without intercourse and 25 years without a girlfriend—walked into an LA Fitness club and shot three women dead before killing himself.
Again, I don’t think the American “Nazis” can compete with such numbers over the same time frame. But perhaps our culture is stuck at a point where “Nazis” are still far worse than men who go on killing sprees because nobody will copulate with them.
What’s sad but telling is that the self-identified incels seem aware of why women don’t desire them, but like most people, they place the blame anywhere but themselves. Judging by their own statements, most of these losers in the Mating Sweepstakes are fully aware that they are either fat, ugly, short, socially awkward, economically impoverished, or have a small penis—all of which are perennial deal-breakers for most women.
And one might be tempted to pity them if they were simply honest and admitted this is the reason that all the handsome, rich “Chads” are snagging all the desirable “Stacys.”
But no—they blame Chad, Stacy, and a permissive culture that allows women to make their own sexual decisions. In such a scenario, the 20% of men who are Chads are free to sexually romp with 80% of women, while the 80% of men who wind up as incels under this deal are left to battle one another for the 20% of women who are so ugly that no one wants them, anyway.
They are the mirror image of the stereotypical homely feminist who blames handsome men and voluptuous women for the fact that no one wants her repulsive face or disgusting personality.
And some of them, apparently with utmost seriousness, call for a violent incel uprising that recalibrates the social order so that every male who wants to mate is assigned a female companion, whether she wants them or not. To avenge the wrongs that a cruel God has inflicted on their physiognomy and personality, they seek affirmative action—by any means necessary—for men who can’t get laid. They want handouts of free vagina for men who can’t get any based on their own merits.
The irony is that if you just swapped genders and this was a phenomenon of extremely ugly women screaming that the handsome men get all the women and that anyone who has an enjoyable sex life needs to be murdered, these hideous, bitter, unfuckable men would see those ugly shrews for the ridiculous fools that they are.
