Laugh of the Day 2.0: Boris Johnson objects to "The New English Letter Box"

Quoted here:

"If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree," he said.

"I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes."

And he added that "a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber" he would ask her to remove it to speak to her.

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

Variety review of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie can't get even recent history right

Here:

At one point, amid all the fringe academics he interviews, D’Souza sits down with Richard Spencer, the white supremacist and alt-right crusader who came to mainstream prominence when he led the May 13, 2017, riots in Charlottesville.

There were no riots in May. Those were in August. And about the only thing Spencer led then was the retreat when the local Democrat authorities gave police a stand down order, effectively giving Antifa the green light to attack.

There is no variety at Variety, just the homogeneity of political correctness, aka fake news.

Meanwhile orthodox Jewry in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut is head over heels in love with Donald Trump

Laugh of the Day: Socialist Jew invested in being white gets the bad news that just being white makes him a racist

Isaac Chotiner: What could a white person in America in 2018 do to not be racist, or do you believe that’s impossible?

Robin DiAngelo: Well, I have to ask you a question I forgot to ask you earlier. What is your racial identity?

Isaac Chotiner: I’m white. My family’s originally from Eastern Europe. 

Seen here.

Mandela's ANC government in South Africa writes off whites as murderers

I guess Obama's message in July fell on deaf ears:

'It’s not justice if now you’re on top, so I’m going to do the same thing that those folks were doing to me, and now I’m going to do it to you. That’s not justice. “I detest racialism,” [Mandela] said, “whether it comes from a black man or a white man.”'

Asli Erdogan: Turkey has descended into fascism under President Erdogan

Quoted here:

The award-winning author [not related to the president], still traumatised by the four months she spent in an Istanbul prison, warns that Turkey's institutions are "in a state of total collapse".

"The extent of things in Turkey is like Nazi Germany. I think it is a fascist regime. It is not yet 1940s Germany, but 1930s. A crucial factor is the lack of a judicial system. Erdogan is almost omnipotent. He decides on the price of medicine, on the future of classical ballet, his family members are in charge of the economy. Opera, which he hates, is also directly tied to him. That's the nice thing about fascism, it's also pathetically funny sometimes. It's an emergency state made permanent."

James Whitman is clearly a man of the left who indicts the entire British patrimony as racist

From an interview Whitman gave to Salon last September:

It is important to note how the United States was not alone in its commitment to the idea of white settler democracy. We find the same phenomenon elsewhere in places colonized by the British. In Australia you see a very similar pattern, New Zealand and South Africa of course, and in Canada as well. That’s part of what I learned in doing the research for this book, and I have to say, it is a troubling and challenging fact that what reemerged with the white supremacists in Charlottesville seems to grow out of a British tradition that we like to think of as a great source of liberty, democracy and equality for the world.

Dinesh D'Souza has been aware for a long time that his source Whitman is a leftist, and he believes Whitman is dishonest because he does not acknowledge the peculiar culpability of southern Democrats in crafting the race laws.

Dinesh D'Souza's new movie "Death of a Nation" popularizes research by James Q. Whitman of Yale

Published in early 2017, Yale Law School said of the book at the time:

"[T]here is much evidence of deep Nazi engagement with American race law in the early 1930s—too much to ignore."

A reviewer for Inside Higher Ed here was clearly disgusted with what he had learned from the book:

Many people will take the very title as an affront. But it’s the historical reality the book discloses that proves much harder to digest. The author does not seem prone to sensationalism. ...

Hitler’s American Model is scholarship and not an editorial traveling incognito. Its pages contain many really offensive statements about American history and its social legacy. But those statements are all from primary sources -- statements about America, made by Nazis, usually in the form of compliments. ...

A stenographic transcript from 1934 provides Whitman’s most impressive evidence of how closely Nazi lawyers and functionaries had studied American racial jurisprudence. A meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform “involved repeated and detailed discussion of the American example, from its very opening moments,” Whitman writes, including debate between Nazi radicals and what we’d have to call, by default, Nazi moderates.

The moderates insisted on stare decisis:

The moderates argued that legal tradition required consistency. Any new statute forbidding mixed-race marriages had to be constructed in accord with the one existing precedent for treating a marriage as criminal: the law against bigamy. This would have been a bit of a stretch, and the moderates preferred letting the propaganda experts discourage interracial romance rather than making it a police matter. The radicals were working from a different conceptual tool kit. ...

The lawyers whom Whitman identifies as Nazi radicals seemed to appreciate how indifferent the American states were to German standards of rigor. True, the U.S. laws showed a lamentable indifference to Jews and Gentiles marrying. But otherwise they were as racist as anything the führer could want.

Wells Fargo sets aside $8 million to compensate about 400 homeowners foreclosed from 2010-2015 due to computer glitch

Well whoopdedoo. That's about only $20,000 a pop.

Sorry you lost your job. Here's a sandwich.

Story here.

Nikolas Cruz was failed at least twice, by the cops months before the shooting he perpetrated, and by his school

He had called the cops on himself around Thanksgiving 2017, as The New York Times reported in February.

Now it turns out his school failed to inform him he was eligible for counseling services when he asked for help around the same time.

His mother had died on November 1, 2017. His father had died years earlier, in 2004. So this was an already troubled young man who became lost and alone in the world before he did what he did.

So Senator Dianne Feinstein is worth north of $46 million because her husband Blum benefitted from her closure of the Mountain Pass mine

Feinsteinah, rhymes with Mountain Pass Mineah while tradin' with China.

Honestly your honor, I had no idea my driver was a spy for China.

So Senator Dianne Feinstein's driver was a spy for China for almost 20 years, apparently from 1993-2013

What a joke our country is.

Dianne Emiel Goldman Berman Feinstein Blum has been on the Senate INTELLIGENCE Committee since 2001, but never knew.

Feinstein had a Chinese spy connection she didn’t know about — her driver

How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies

Details Surface About Chinese Spy Who Worked For Sen. Feinstein

Jordan Weissmann affects a fever over QAnon despite Pew finding that "commitment to representative democracy is strongest in North America and Europe"

Here:

What makes QAnon a little a different, and little bit scarier, than many of the conspiracy theories Americans have latched onto through the decades, is that it’s fundamentally authoritarian . . . They’re waiting for the sitting president to deliver their country from evil by rounding up his political opposition. Adherents have taken to jubilantly counting up the sealed indictments federal authorities have filed lately because they see them as a sign that a mass wave of arrests is coming. At Trump’s Wednesday night rally in Tampa, Florida, a shocking number of attendees showed up with QAnon T-shirts and signs. These people are all but asking for a strongman to seize control of the country . . . You can’t tell how many are really out there, but they’re now part of the political fabric in a country where around 1 in 5 people think we’d be better off with a strongman leader, and 17 percent say they’d be OK with military rule.

He's referring to this from Pew, which nevertheless finds "broad support for representative and direct democracy" globally:

There is less support for a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from a parliament or courts. Still, about a quarter or more back this idea in Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, Hungary, South Korea and the U.S. And while military rule is relatively unpopular, 17% endorse this idea in the established democracies of the U.S., Italy and France.

France, Italy, the US, three overly generous countries being injected with many costly, difficult to assimilate, and lawless "refugees".

Democrat Mayor of Portland, Oregon, is another Antifa enabler

Anarchy Breaks Out in Portland, With the Mayor’s Blessing: A vicious mob targeted the ICE office and even a food cart. The police followed orders to do nothing:

Where were the police? Ordered away by Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who doubles as police commissioner. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.” ...

“I join those outraged by ICE actions separating parents from their children, and support peaceful protest to give voice to our collective moral conscience.”

The Hakes family, which owns the Happy Camper food cart across the street from ICE’s office, responded to the statement with incredulity. The mob “terrorized our family” and forced the business to close, Julie Hakes told me.

Mitchell Research and Communications has John James beating Sandy Pensler 44-30 in Michigan Republican US Senate primary

Reported here this morning, +/- 5 points.

Conservatism upside-down: Russell Kirk chair in history at Hillsdale held by professed libertarian

Bradley J. Birzer, here:

"I have never considered myself a classical liberal, but I have always considered myself libertarian."

Russell Kirk, of course, was neither, but especially not libertarian.

And at public universities also it is common for atheists to chair religion departments.

An alt-right taxonomy one year after Charlottesville, and its prospects for survival

Provided by Paul Gottfried, with useful links, in Paul Gottfried: Charlottesville After A Year—As An Outsider, I Think The Alt-Right Far From Finished, from which this excerpt:

Growing racial tensions, reckless immigration and a further weakening of already-weakened social bonds could all help the Alt-Right expand its following.

Part of the Alt Right’s eventual success may come from its anti-traditionalism. The Alt-Right is mostly (but not entirely) anti-Christian and advances a Nietzschean or neo-pagan perspective. It is thereby in sync with the growing secularism of millennials.  

And the Alt-Right doesn’t wear itself out trying to defend the traditional bourgeois family. It appears to be made up largely of young, unattached bloggers. Most of those Alt-Right publicists I read focus on racial conflict or the struggle between civilizations; and they push these themes far more frankly and with less careerist backtracking than the well-paid propagandists of Conservatism, Inc. They also cite telling statistics about racial and gender differences; and they pride themselves on their openness to science as well as on their sometimes vaguely defined “radical traditionalism.”

The Alt-Right belongs to a post-conservative Right. 

This is another way of saying the future success of the alt-right depends on the continued splintering of the American experience occasioned by its enthusiasm for secular ideologies.

Hence the way to defeat the alt-right, if that is what the left really wants, is to reject multiculturalism and participate in unifying the country instead of working toward its demise. And that implies supporting the radical correction of America's immigration laws symbolized and actualized by Donald Trump's wall.

But, of course, that would make too much sense, as little sense as reproducing oneself the old-fashioned way, by marrying and having children.

Idealism, of whatever stripe, is poison, but our thirst for it, unfortunately, is the well nigh inescapable bastard patrimony of our Christian past. 

Or that the charm and venom, which they drunk,

Their blood with secret filth infected hath,

Being diffused through the senseless trunk

That, through the great contagion, direful deadly stunk.

-- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Canto II, iv.

60.5% are working, not 63%: That's 6.4 million missing workers in this so-called boom

If this is a boom how come the scale of pay raises is so puny compared with the last three cycles?