So, at the very least, five or six agencies chased dozens of witnesses, nine LLCs and general corporations, an untold number of other allegedly fake companies, a long list of bank accounts, a countywide network of real estate, and a series of credit card statements, the latter producing detailed statements in the complaint about the luxury goods Soofer allegedly purchased using public funds. His wife apparently has some quite nice Hermes sandals that Los Angeles taxpayers bought her, if the FBI is correct. I attempted to get more information from the city controller who started the ball rolling, but his office has yet to respond to questions. I’ve never once found that the FBI answers questions about its investigations, so I haven’t bothered to ask them about it.

Read the complaint linked above and form your own conclusion, but an educated guess is that it’s a description of hundreds of hours of investigation, and maybe more. It continues, and they’re clearly still digging.

Now, Soofer allegedly represents about $10 million in local fraud, and Mehmet Oz says that just the category of medical fraud in just that one county probably amounts to about $3.5 billion a year. In Minneapolis, Nick Shirley is visiting single addresses listed in public records as the office for multiple businesses that can’t actually be found there, and the X user who posts as Data Republican is suggesting that some single addresses in the city are actually the address of record for hundreds of potentially fraudulent businesses.

Do the math in your head: How many cops, doing how many hours of investigation, will it take to unravel tens of billions of dollars of overlapping fraud in government-funded health care, transportation, daycare, and homeless services nonprofits, in California and Minnesota and wherever else large numbers of nonprofits chase a massive pool of federal, state, and local public funds?

Americans are quite lightly policed, and should be. //

Our police do their work at the margins and are funded and staffed on the premise that they’re chasing small numbers of bad guys in a population of honest citizens. If that cultural premise fails, we don’t have the cops to fix it.

The first place to stop fraud is with a healthy culture. The second place to stop it is in a limited government that doesn’t offer a bunch of free cash for thieves to steal. The third solution, investigations and arrests, is clumsy, slow, and likely to prove grossly inadequate. //

The more we undermine the first culture and import the second, the more we’re going to foster public services fraud. That’s not what we want to do.

The creative constituents of Western music have a choice to make: continue manifesting hell on earth, or begin magnifying redemption through their art.

Music is a balance of tension and resolution. A mentor once told me that the greatest composers are those who demonstrate mastery of this basic tenet. Dissonance, one form of musical tension, empowers harmony and resolution when used well. However, with few exceptions, today’s composers reject the natural order of tension and resolution. They opt instead to create sonic nightmares, soundscapes smeared upon a postmodern canvas in which tonality is subjective. There is never a true resolution, only growing ugliness.

That is why the celebration of the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who turned 90 on Sept. 11, offers more than a glimmer of hope. Pärt, whose style of composing is indelibly intertwined with his Orthodox Christian faith, is being celebrated at Carnegie Hall and around the world for creating music that is beautiful in a time when ugliness is preferred. //

Pärt’s musical legacy is one that very few composers, of this century or others, will hold a candle to. Still, a handful of other current composers are breathing life into the landscape. In the choral world, it is no wonder that composer Eric Whitacre has attained cult-status. His music, while reputably redundant, is beautiful; choirs enjoy singing his work, and audiences love hearing it. His piece “Lux Aurumque” has been streamed more than 9 million times on Spotify alone. Yet Whitacre is largely dismissed by the same art composers and academic superiors whose own music suffers from terminal unlikability. //

Great suffering can produce a person who resembles the devil, but it can also produce a person who resembles God. The difference is how one suffers; suffering can be sanctifying.

Contemporary art music embodies suffering without sanctification, and thus, it has fallen from beauty to ugliness. Art embodies ugliness only when suffering is glorified for its own sake, rather than as a means to an end: sanctification and ultimately, redemption.

Redford’s masculine charm wasn’t at all boring, like the “Barefoot” bride perceives her hubby. Much the opposite. He was a complex, controlled and sly actor, who seduced with ease in every genre he touched.

“Like the greatest movie stars, Bob understands the power of restraint,” his “The Way We Were” co-star Barbra Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, “My Name Is Barbra.”

“You’re never going to get it all … and that’s the mystery … that’s what makes you want to keep looking at him.”

As first reported by the BBC, a sharp uptick of men have been attending a Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (or ROCOR) in Georgetown, Texas, led by Father Moses McPherson. //

After watching McPherson's YouTube channel for a bit, I can see why many people would gravitate toward him, especially men. McPherson seems to reject modernist takes on gender roles and encourages young people to get married, settle down, and have children. In one short, he holds up a pregnancy test and encourages couples to get a positive one. He also calls masturbation "pathetic and unmanly".

A lot of McPherson's positions seem to be blunt, unwavering, and unapologetic, and I think that's what is attracting a lot of men right now. They feel like they can be proud of their masculinity in the way that God sees it, and this ROCOR growth seems to show that men aren't just seeking that kind of welcome; they want to foster it and find fellowship in that kind of scene.

Modern society makes it clear that masculinity is unwelcome and distasteful, and men are often made out to be the bad guy no matter what the scenario entails, yet at this faith, men are held in higher esteem. They're obviously still held highly accountable for their actions, but this accountability comes with love and encouragement, not blame and derision.

These kids are using AI to communicate for them, to generate words that explain complex emotions or situations.

It's not a dead internet; it's an internet that still bustles with human activity, but it's done so through the puppet of AI. No longer are we presenting ourselves to one another, with our quirks, personalities, vulnerabilities, and even weirdness. Our communication with each other is sanitized and predictable. We lose our cultural idiosyncrasies in the face of responses generated by a program that has been trained on all the same data. Human interaction becomes scripted, not genuine.

People often express fear of AI becoming sentient and destroying humanity, a Hollywood outcome that is highly unlikely, but what should scare people more is that the ghost in the machine isn't some algorithm that evolves out of our control... it's us. We're the ghost in the machine.

I predicted a while back that humanity would merge with AI in a way, but my hope is that it wouldn't involve us effectively wearing an AI suit that turns humanity into a synthetic being when it comes to how we face the world. I think it's absolutely terrifying that we could become so homogenous in how we present ourselves to the outside world that you can't really tell one person from the next when at a virtual distance.

This is effectively us handing our humanity over to a machine and telling it to act for us while we withdraw into ourselves and forget how to speak to each other in a raw, unfiltered manner. //

Still, our relationship with AI was always going to be one of assistance, which is fine. I just don't think it's good when we become the machine. We strip ourselves of humanity for convenience, and not having to handle our own emotions in emotional moments. We just become robots, and we become robots to each other.

The Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) of 21st February 1941 reported that a song titled Padoodle, “about a boy, a girl and a “one-eyed automobile””, had been announced a nation-wide second place winner in Tommy Dorsey’s Fame and Fortune. It had been written the previous year by a Pittsburgh orphan boy, Robert Ruben, who, encouraged by this success, went on writing songs.

The earliest occurrence of the form padiddle that I have found is in the comic strip Archie, by Robert William ‘Bob’ Montana (1920-75), published in the Nevada State Journal of 23rd May 1948:

The press and left call the right “culture warriors,” but we were not the ones who put pornographic material in elementary schools. We were not the ones who demanded kids in colleges attend seminars to learn about their inner racism. We were not the ones who demanded boys get into girls sports.

The left and press call us “culture warriors” solely because we said no and fought back against them.

And this is what it looks like for them to lose.

The press, infested by the left, sees horror and destruction all around it. What I see, as a conservative, is an effort to raze the purportedly neutral institutions irredeemably infected with progressivism. Government bureaucracies, academic institutions, and non-governmental entities were all formed as neutral institutions, but the left chose institutional capture. The left chose to advance its agenda from within these otherwise neutral institutions, infecting them, and now the only cure is tearing them down.

Academia became reliably progressive and deeply hostile to alternative viewpoints. USAID started funding trans-kids in Uganda. The press rushed to call pregnant women first “pregnant person,” then “birthing person.” The homeless became “unhoused.” And non-profits threw money at media outlets to subsidize left-wing activists as reporters to scare everyone about climate change. Progressives demanded diversity so long as the skin colors, genders, and sexual identities were different and the thinking was all homogeneously, uniformly progressive.

The left spent so long calling those of us on the right culture warriors, we finally decided to declare war. This is us fighting back, tearing down the ideologically captured institutions, and making it hard for them to rebuild or restore their trust.

You people on the left pivoted to censorship and press coverage of misinformation and disinformation — all while getting stuff wrong. We have used the internet to weaponize your lies against you and destroy your credibility with your own reporting. Trust in the media is now lower than even freaking Congress.

And you brought it on yourselves. You chose to embrace the left, be infiltrated by the left, be co-opted by the left, and finally taken over by the left. Along the way, you became arrogant and sclerotic. //

But you will not find me criticizing the razing of these institutions or the hard-charging approach to burning them all down.

It is time. The hubris of those involved from the left shows that reform is not possible, only destruction.

This is what it looks like when the right has had enough and starts fighting back. And right now, you progressives are, very deservedly, losing.

We would have accepted neutral institutions. But you foisted DEI on us all. The New York Times declared the country is systemically racist and rewrote the founding history of the nation, which some of you then pushed into public schools for re-education. You used your cultural, institutional, and media clout to chase advertisers and revenue away from right-leaning institutions and voices. You attacked productive industries with media outlets subsidized by progressive environmental groups. You captured the government-funded national radio network and turned it into soft-spoken progressive hacks. You took over academic institutions and started discriminating against Asian kids. You took over public schools and decided learning the colors of the Pride Flag was more important than learning math. When COVID happened, you people shut down schools, kept those schools shut down, and when the inevitable collapse of learning occurred, you lied about keeping schools shut down and tried, with willing accomplices in the left-controlled press, to shift the blame. In Illinois, progressive educators dragged girls into bathrooms and forced them to change in front of boys. You even got the Voice of America to explain white privilege while refusing to call Hamas “terrorists.”

So now you’ll watch the rest of us wipe out those institutions. You could have had neutrality. Instead, you called us culture warriors all while waging war to capture and use neutral institutions against everyone else. You could have chosen to embrace diversity of thought. Now, you can embrace the rubble.

This is what it looks like when the right fights back. When Trump is done, you’ll eventually take power again. There is no permanence in American politics. But you will find rubble and learn it is faster to destroy than to build. You brought this on yourselves. I have plenty of words of caution to the right and Trump supporters about overplayed hands, going too far, etc. But I can save those thoughts for later.

Kids have figured out that America’s failing liberal institutions have left them surrounded by a harmful cultural and political order that can’t justify itself. //

But in the clip from the debate that was most widely shared, a young Hispanic guy asks Seder about his objections to supposed religious fundamentalists and then, as the kids say, he proceeds to absolutely own Seder. Essentially, the question put before Seder is this: If he objects to traditional religious values as a foundation for guiding America’s collective political and legal decisions, what does he think should be the basis for morality? //

Presumably, Seder knew this debate would be hostile, but he seems genuinely shocked a kid would cut right to matters of first principles and question the assumptions of moral authority underpinning bog standard boomer liberalism. But this shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. When it comes to political punditry, there’s a pretty basic test for whether or not you take someone seriously: How does that person justify the use of political power to implement the policies they favor?

What Seder was asked was far from a trick question; rather, it’s basic American civics. This is exactly the question that the Declaration of Independence addresses, as the founders knew that any attempt to legitimize the rejection of their present government would start with establishing why the government they were proposing was more just and morally superior. In that sense, it wasn’t just a declaration — it’s an explanation of the basis of morality, and how England’s governance was illegitimate for not respecting it. So our founding document is a fairly succinct and compelling natural law argument for a government that recognizes all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that cannot be abrogated, let alone by a king who claims the “divine right” to tax people on a whim.

Of course, the actual structure of American governance is more complicated than that because we have to define and apply those rights, and the most just way to do that involves consent of the governed. So our system hinges on allowing an element of democracy, while putting enough checks in the system to ensure the tyranny of the majority doesn’t overwhelm the God-given rights of individuals. We don’t always get the balance right, but that’s the basic idea. And there’s no getting around the fact that having objective notions of morality, traditionally represented by a belief in God, is foundational to our whole system. You may not like the structure of American governance, but you’d think a guy who’s been doing liberal talk radio and podcasts for over twenty years would recognize why the question he was asked was so important and have a coherent way to answer it.

As Chris Rufo observes, “The remarkable thing here is that the Left’s ‘debate champ’ doesn’t see the entire setup, which means he’s ignorant of basic Christian theology, the natural rights theory of the American founders, and the criticism from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault. Just doesn’t know any of it.” There’s also an element of blatant hypocrisy here as well. “Seder objects to religion because it ‘imposes’ values on everyone,” notes professor and First Things editor Mark Bauerlein. “It is, however, a dream to think that imposition of values is NOT a precondition of every social order. (Foucault’s prime critique of liberalism is that it presumes such.)” //

In other words, it’s safe to assume Seder is defending the dominant liberal order imposing its values on everyone because it’s what he knows and what he prefers, not because he can articulate why it’s justifiably “moral.” Nor is our current liberal order necessarily a matter of consent or democracy. This is pretty evident in the left’s approach to social issues. Gay marriage flailed in nearly every referendum it faced, and only became legal after the Supreme Court made it legal by decree, using a decision that has all the defensible legal and moral rubric one would expect to find on the back of a cereal box. And when a more conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the left screamed in unison they actually preferred it when nine unelected judges conjured up a new right to murder children in the womb that half the country found morally abhorrent, rather than letting such a controversial issue be decided by be democratic means.

And when liberals couldn’t exercise raw power to get their way in courtrooms and legislative chambers, they leveraged the economic might of corporate America to enforce their agenda. Despite the fact BLM was a scam literally run by communists who explicitly stated the nuclear family was an obstacle to “social justice,” corporations were alternately bullied and praised into giving BLM and related causes $83 billion even as the movement burned cities to the ground.

The problem is that you can only arbitrarily impose values on people from the top down for so long before there’s political and cultural backlash.

The funny thing about this is that some of these memes started as leftist attacks, but the right co-opted them and ran with it. Why would they do it?

I think Tim Pool actually nailed it in a conversation he had about the memes. There are going to be people who don't get why Vance's own supporters would make memes that make fun of Vance, and a lot of these people are going to be women. Not bashing women, but the way men and women communicate is different.

When men like each other, they'll actively make fun of one another. It's how we express ourselves to one another in a way that might not seem close, and possibly even confrontational, but it's actually an expression of appreciation and respect. //

These memes are communicating to the public that Vance is fun, culturally relevant, and culturally irreverent at the same time. He can laugh with us, even at himself, making him more relatable and approachable. His levity stands in stark contrast to leftist severity, which makes him even more endearing to the people. //

Politics is downstream of culture, and Vance is being inserted into the culture in a way that is more or less unlooked-for but powerful nonetheless. Memes are a powerful cognitive tool, especially in the age of the internet, and Vance starring in so many — especially in the form of good-natured mocking — is making him a cultural mainstay.

It's the kind of popularity politicians wish they could get, but rarely do.

What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with this culture, that it sees this as acceptable?

This is not a mere "cultural" difference. This isn't something that may be considered wrong in one society and not in another. This is wrong in essence; it is wrong no matter where, when, or to whom it happens. And the sad part is that the current law isn't nearly as, well, savage. //

Batta's story, should serve as a cautionary tale, as we have been importing thousands upon thousands of people from this part of the world, for who knows what reason, for years now. They are setting enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota - and some among them might agree with these Iraqi lawmakers and clerics.

It can happen here, and if you think some of these people might not try it, well, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Even when not in situations where violence is needed, men are excellent leaders and decision makers. They're solution-oriented and effective at implementing these solutions, even in the midst of pushback.

So the key to control is to kick that will to fight out of men, and to do that, you have to have a multi-front assault on masculinity and the inherent drives of men. It's something that has to be done over a long period of time, and if you look at our current situation in terms of the state of masculinity, you'll see this very plan has been in motion for a while. //

Our society, including our schools, have done a lot to both intentionally and unintentionally remove the fighting spirit and masculinity of men. Boys are treated like "defective girls" as psychologist Michael Thompson put it. Their natural energy and rambunctiousness is suppressed with rules and even drugs. Their preoccupation with action-based play, mock battles, and games that center on good vs. evil have become punishable offenses.

They tell young men that their masculinity is evil, and needs to be reduced if not eliminated entirely. It's "toxic," and needs to be reimagined to be softer, passive... and quiet. In media, the men are no loner displayed as strong, they're not put into leadership roles, and if they are, then there's always a female counterpart who is always better in every way that counts. Stars even go so far as to display themselves in women's clothing, showing that masculinity is just a social construct and men should embrace this new softer side of themselves by acting like women. //

Of course, then there's the way society comes down on masculinity in social situations. Commercials like the Gillette "We Believe" ad painted the very nature of men as ridiculous and awful, and while the pushback cost P&G billions, all it did was teach big stage tastemakers not to attack men directly and do it subversively instead. Corporations began promoting "transgender" people, celebrating males becoming females.

There were also legal punishments for being masculine, and you saw that recently in the form of Daniel Penny, a man who stood up for the innocent and took down a violent criminal, neutralizing him and saving others. Penny was thankfully found innocent in a court of law, but let's not pretend this wasn't an attempt to dissuade onlooking men from being a hero when the time came.

Carl Jackson brought up this very point in a recent program where he said, "if you abolish chivalry, you increase the nanny state." He brings up the fact that the left wants me to "tuck their testicles" and notes, as I have, that they've been "largely successful." //

We have to start celebrating masculinity. We have to start encouraging boys to be boys. We have to make men dangerous again.

Because a free, stable society cannot exist if dangerous men aren't there to protect and maintain it. There is no civilization if men aren't willing to fight for it. There is no order if dangerous men aren't willing to establish it. //

Magnus
8 hours ago
Dr Peterson has discussed this with details. Dangerous, disciplined, chivalrous men who are locked and loaded. Mr. Penny comes to mind.

We’ve gone from not trusting the feds to not trusting the local police in Altoona, PA.

But it is just asking questions. Can I ask one: Do any of the people just asking questions have monetized Twitter accounts?

It’s a social media-driven phenomenon. During the Dominion Voting v. Fox News case, we got the inside text messages of Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson. It turns out almost all of them thought Trump was full of crap and the “stolen election” stuff was a lie.

However, their public thoughts were more obtuse or contradicted their private thoughts. Surprisingly, people preferred to believe Tucker Carlson questioned the election and had Trump’s back rather than believe his private thoughts conveyed to friends and colleagues that both doubted Trump’s claims and said, “I hate him passionately.”

Now, everybody is just asking questions. It is a clever way of seeding doubt and then watering it.

First, you cast doubt on the local police in Altoona, PA. Or just highlight Mangione’s questions. Then you sprinkle in doubts about federal prosecutors and investigators in something entirely different, tie it all together in the name of just asking questions, and hope your Twitter account is monetized for the traffic.

The Rubes will believe it, hopefully.

Too many are willing to believe it.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote about men without chests. But he also had this:

[Y]ou will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

People just asking questions are not trying to see through things. They are hoping to make you see nothing, so you must rely on them. Too many people are. In the end, we have a nation that trusts no one and nothing and, therefore, is unable to get answers while asking questions.

Luigi Mangione began his descent into rage by just asking questions. He saw through the system and saw through whatever might be on the other side and finally saw nothing except revenge. He explained away the explanation itself and, on the other side, found violence.

Now, people who just a few days ago insisted something must be wrong because the police should have surely arrested someone quickly because look at Lee Harvey Oswald will now question who got arrested because it just seems so damn convenient.

Our society is dangerously close to spiraling out of control. The people who intend just to ask questions are helping sow the seeds, and those who, because of their distrust of “the system,” cannot grapple with basic answers will be the tip of the spear.

Much has been made here at RedState about the growing progressive rot permeating various film franchises, most noticeably comic book-based ones such as the MCU and Justice League. While the incessant preaching and corresponding drops in box office revenue are well worth covering, another omnipresent yet overlooked element warrants further examination. Filling this gap, Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s (FilmLadd on Twitter) latest installment of his excellent video series dissecting both pop culture and political grifters compares Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western “The Wild Bunch,” one of the first films made taking full advantage of the Hays Code’s discontinuation, with Joss Wheldon’s 2012 “The Avengers.” The latter comes out decidedly second best on multiple fronts. //

Ehlinger Jr.’s video focuses on how violence is depicted in each film, comparing “The Avengers” outlandish cartoon stylization to “The Wild Bunch” and its utilization of slow motion and quick cuts not solely for cinematic effect but also to depict as accurately as possible violence’s horrific consequences, the suffering and death that come with the real thing. As he comments:

There’s no violence in movies, video games, and the rest; only depictions of violence. It then becomes a matter of depicting violence in a moral or immoral way.

Ehlinger Jr. explains that while “The Wild Bunch” has vast quantities of spilled blood, it does so not to shock or titillate but to emphasize violence’s graphic, messy nature. There are no bloodless bullet holes or immunity to gunfire based on gender or age. Women and children bleed and die just as agonizingly as men. Ehlinger Jr. compares this to the cartoonish ways the humans in “The Avengers” pull off stunts that would, in real life, mean certain death without getting so much as a glorified paper cut. //

Peckinpah’s life was hardly a quiet one centered on Bible study and prayer. Yet ironically, his films are laced with a strong moral code straight from Scripture. What a person plants, they will always harvest. The Old Testament prophet Hosea said it best: They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind. As Ladd Ehlinger Jr. shows us, noting that which was done better in bygone days is not the sole prerogative of previous dusty generations railing against the wind. It is the raw truth. Ignore it at your peril. //

INTJ
2 years ago edited
So, Sergeant York or The Longest Day, both Hays-era films, never inspired violence? What's the difference? What about Psycho? The issue is much more complex and nuanced than is suggested. I would argue that the lack of societal consequences for acts of violence - think Soros D.A.'s - has a far greater impact. //

Cafeblue32 Real GOP 690
2 years ago edited
The avengers isn’t a moral tale? Of course it is.

Shakespeare I believe pointed out long ago there are basically only six stories that are told to describe the human condition. I can’t remember what they all are now, but one is starcrossed lovers who find each other, or they almost find each other. There is the rescuing of the maiden, the slaying of the dragons, the fulfilling of the hero’s quest. All of it is based in morality or to otherwise reenforce values and ideas we used to commonly hold.

There is no neutral input to humans. Whatever we see and hear is internalized and filed away by the subconscious mind. We present tales of murder and violence to others and punishment for it so that we don’t do it in real life. Hollywood is doing its best to strip entertainment of moral considerations, and that is one big reason it sucks. If there is no overall stakes of losing right, wrong, justice and freedom, then there is no conflict, only bitchy people whining about not getting what they want. And the violence becomes a glorified street fight we aren’t invested in because it isn’t about us.

Hollywood removes the consequences of violence and produces movies where people are bloodfilled meat bags to be killed in various ways while we cheer the heroes carnage. They are seldom ever about a larger societal benefit. It is usually personal revenge, or restoration, or some other McGuffin that is their reason.

Violence in superhero movies is sanitized. What happened to all those people in those city buildings they so casually demolish? Or all the cars they smash, or bridges they destroy, etc? People play such a minimal role in the superhero genre anymore that the new Flash movie had him racing around city streets without a single car or person on them. We are just CGI representations of NPCs, bodies incidental to the action.

J.R.R. Tolkien did not write a story about why power is evil but about why domination is evil. //

For example, at the end of the story, Aragorn does not renounce power and wander off into the wilderness to smoke pipeweed. He claims the throne and with it the power that is rightfully his — and he does so with none of the reluctance that Peter Jackson added to the film adaptation. Likewise, characters such as Gandalf and Galadriel do not renounce power as such — indeed, they have and use great power — but they do renounce a certain sort and use of power.

What they reject is the domination that makes people into thralls and slaves. //

But French misunderstands Tolkien. Indeed, if anyone is disqualified on Tolkien’s terms, it is those such as French who reject natural law and the legitimate power of governments to make and enforce laws in accord with it. Unlike French, Tolkien did not urge us to embrace a relativistic legal pluralism that cannot distinguish between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, God and Satan.

Put simply, Aragorn would not have tolerated Uruk-hai story hour.

“Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: They see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and ‘colonizers,’ so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good…,” she said. “This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word — the Vandals sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy.” //

A father or mother deficit is one of the chief causes of systemic American social problems including crime, addiction, poverty, depression, early sexual activity, low achievement, and susceptibility to predators. Indeed, the decline of marriage and the Marxist denigration of men are chief sources of our culture’s decline. You only have to name any effect of Cultural Marxism to see almost instantly that stronger and better men and women would end or reduce it.

So while she speaks true and admirable words repudiating Marxist politics, in her own life, like other alleged anti-Marxists Rubin and Benson, Weiss enacts those same politics. Despite spending her entire professional life chronicling sexual politics, like most in our society Weiss is still blind to the full implications.

Weiss is clearly open to changing her mind and adopting counter-culture positions. So can others who share her current sexual preferences, and those sympathetic to them. If we truly want to save Western civilization, which protects us all, we must refuse to perpetuate Marxism no matter how much we want a child in our arms.

In Sex and Culture (1934), Oxford scholar J. D. Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. //

MCP
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sexual repression is the foundation of civilization.
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2008
That is the basic thesis of this unjustly forgotten book. According to Professor Unwin, who was influenced by Freud, it is the "limitation of sexual opportunity" which creates the "mental energy" necessary to build a civilization.

He backs this up with exhaustive examples of the historical cycle he proposes. The cycle goes as follows: in a primitive society, people take their pleasure at whim, without commitment or limits. Then the practice of monogamous marriage, including premarital chastity, is instituted. (How he believes this first arises would take far too long to summarize here; read the book!) The sexual repression required for this chastity and fidelity increases the "mental energy" and the inner strength of those who practice it, enabling them to embark on long-term projects such as monumental architecture, agriculture, and conquest. In this early stage, men have enormous power over their wives and children, even when the children have grown up. ... //

Cornelius
5.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
Brilliant and Shocking Exposition of Sexual Regulations and Cultural Advance
Reviewed in Canada on November 27, 2019
Unger surveys eighty so-called 'primitive' civilizations, as well as six advanced civilizations, and finds a stunning correlation between the extent of a society's pre-marital and post-marital sexual regulations, and its civilizational advance (conquest, exploration, abstract thought, industry, commerce, etc.). In general, the more restrained a society is when it comes to sex, the more repressed sexual energy is created; that repressed energy is then transformed into, and given full expression in, productive, outward endeavours. As an anthropologist, Unger is surprisingly careful; since this book was published in 1934, I expected a stereotypical Englishman's exaltation of the white man's superior intellect. Unger does not fall for such preposterousness; he even admits that there is no reason to believe that coloured men have inferior intellects or abilities. In fact, he argues against the racialism that prevailed in his day. Although Unger's correlation is interesting, and his causation convincing, I am not convinced by his proposed mechanism: Freudian sexual sublimation. In fact, there are more direct mechanisms that would explain why repressed sexuality translates into powerful outward displays of productive and expansive energy: 1. When sex is more difficult to procure, people engage in more productive activities. This is a simple opportunity cost formula. 2. Men won't invest resources in children that aren't theirs. Sexual restraint ensures that women are less likely to cheat and conceive children with other men. 3. Hypergamy is dominant: without sexual restraint, men and women expend energy in attaining unachievable sexual partners. Aside from these shortcomings, Unger's book is worth reading if you are interested in why sexual restraints come about, and how they relate to civilizational advance.

Hugh Brennan
11 hours ago
Sadly, our woke military and political command destroyed one of Arlington's most remarkable memorials this year. They dismantled Sir Moses Ezekiel's Civil War Confederate- Reconciliation memorial. Sir Moses ( knighted by the King of Italy) was a world famous sculptor, the first Jewish VMI graduate, and a veteran of the famous New Market charge of the VMI cadets. Due to the BLM/Floyd mania of 2020 that did so much harm, the memorial he had created and which stood over his grave and the grave of hundreds of Americans who were Southerners by birth and loyalty has been destroyed. I'm a thoroughgoing Yankee, but my history lessons taught me to respect the Southern soldier, and that grave desecration, the destruction of art, and the reneging on the post-war reconciliation movement are all crimes of people with low moral standards. It is so much harder to create something beautiful than it is to destroy it. Lincoln would never have done it. //

There was a stunning video I now cannot find that shows pictures of all the American military cemeteries in Europe - France, Luxemburg, Italy, etc. More than I knew, thousands of young men resting where they died, not sent home. The sacrifices of Americans for the freedom of others is stunning and unique in the history of the world.

Glenn Beck @glennbeck
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.@RichardDreyfuss tells me he gave up acting "ONLY for something I loved as much, which was saving my country...It infuriates me that people don't understand what this place means."
1:24 / 1:24
11:00 PM · Jan 16, 2023
https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/1615121851784593410

All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies
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Years after Robert Shaw's passing, his JAWS co-star Richard Dreyfuss met his granddaughter and got very emotional.
1:43 / 1:43
12:00 PM · May 1, 2024
https://twitter.com/ATRightMovies/status/1785640322061811725

BUTKER: Our love for Jesus, and thus, our desire to speak out, should never be outweighed by the longing of our fallen nature to be loved by the world. Glorifying God and not ourselves should always remain our motivation despite any pushback or even support. I lean on those closest to me for guidance but I can never forget that it is not people, but Jesus Christ I’m trying to please.

(...)

For if heaven is our goal, we should embrace our cross, however large or small it may be, and live our life with joy, to be a bold witness for Christ."

My words will perhaps seem somewhat vintage in character rather than current or up-to-date. In that context, I admit to being unapologetically Catholic, unapologetically patriotic, and unapologetically a constitutionalist.

[...]

Let me offer you, this year’s graduates, a few brief suggestions about making your deposits in the account of liberty. Today is just the end of the beginning of your young lives, and the beginning, the commencement of the rest of your lives. There is much more to come, and it will not be with the guiding hands of your parents—indeed, they may someday need your hand to guide them. Some of you will most assuredly be called upon to do very hard things to preserve liberty. All of you will be called upon to provide a firm foundation of citizenship by carrying out your obligations in the way so many preceding generations have done. You are to be the example to others that those generations have been to us. And in being that example, what you do will matter far more than what you say.