Freeberg lays out some inconvenient truth.

The term “peaceful protest” is way overused lately. If you’re blocking me on my way to work or some other errand, your protest is not peaceful because you’re interfering in the activities of other people who have nothing to do with the subject of your protest, people who’ve done nothing to you. There is a myth floating around that this is a necessary ingredient, that the protester’s job is to see to it people are forced to pay attention, deprived of the option to ignore. That’s false. Force is force. Initiating force is not peaceful.

Preach it, brother.

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No, they don’t care about Puerto Ricans because they are effectively foreigners — different language and culture. They’d feel the same about Filipinos, and did back when the Philippines were a U.S. dependency.

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That explains a lot.

Paul Rahe looks the situation over.

I will say this for Donald Trump. He really knows how to hit a nerve. He has an instinctive understanding of wrongs swept under the carpet and of how to get those who perpetrate those wrongs to rise up and do themselves harm.

I do not personally much like his way of going about things. Schoolboy taunts seem to me childish and unpresidential, and they can be counter-effective. But let’s face it: with this weapon, he made mincemeat of his Republican opponents, and he defeated Hillary Clinton. He knows something that those of us who are more conventional do not quite get.

Scott Adams has been teaching this almost daily for about a year.

Every once in a while, however, I get a glimpse of what Trump is up to, and then I really am impressed. His attack on the NFL could not be more timely.

I knew Paul at Yale in the mid-70s. He is scary smart and very sound on political questions.

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The backlash continues….

Steelers Fans Burn Their Team Gear

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Thus the NFL ‘protest’ is explained.

My younger brother played football in High School and has been a pinko ever since, so I’m fully prepared to believe that even holding a football is enough to cause brain damage.

And, of course, the Usual Suspects in the DemLegHump media are engaged in a massive effort to link Trump with the flag and the National Anthem in the minds of the American people.  Not their brightest move….

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A cloud upon the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand…. (1 Kings 18:43)

Shortly followed by Luke 12:54. “Then Jesus said to the crowds, “As soon as you see a cloud rising in the west, you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and that is what happens.”

Hope the NFL players have their umbrellas with them.

Jerome Lucille points out some inconvenient truth.

Once upon a time, mass transit was the technocrat’s preferred method for prying people out of their wasteful, dangerous cars. If only we could subsidize the right combination of buses, trolleys, jitneys, light rail, monorail, and bullet trains—the thinking went—all our problems would be solved. To save the planet, “public transportation should be favored over private automobiles, and the cars heavily taxed,” wrote Hugh McDonald of New York City College of Technology in a 2014 book on environmental philosophy. That view is shared by a number of other scholars and policy makers who hope to eliminate traffic deaths, largely by getting rid of cars.

But now there’s a new kid on the block: self-driving cars. The trouble is that neither of these approaches takes into account the reality that almost 20 percent of the population of the United States live in the low-population rural areas that make up the majority of the country’s land mass, and they’re not about to trade in the F-150 for a newfangled robot chariot.

Automobiles mean freedom — freedom to go from where we are to where we want to be at a time and pace of our own choosing. Those Who Know How To Live Our Lives Better Than We Do (Socialists, Communists, Environmentalists, and other varieties of Democrat) don’t like this freedom; they’d much rather we Do It Their Way. They pretty it up with cool-sounding words, but that’s the bottom line.

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This general phenomenon of intense critical hostility to Tolkien in the face of his undeniable popularity is open enough; however, the reasons for it often remain unexpressed, hints and sneers rather than statements. Several attempts have been made to explain this deep and seemingly compulsive antipathy. This is the first of two linked posts that deal, firstly, with Tolkien’s critics and, secondly, with his legacy in the form of his many admirers and emulators.

Pat Sajak brings the heat.

I’m not much of a joiner. Besides, any club that would have me as a member obviously has standards too high for me to live up to. But I am excited about my first meeting tonight with the “Monitor Twitter and Facebook Looking for Anyone Who Says Something Positive or Evenhanded About Donald Trump So We Can Bully and Harass Them on Social Media and Recreational Drugs Club.”

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There is no such thing as ‘equality’ because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

The tests that a chaotic world throws at human beings is never equal or balanced in measure to our strengths to pass them. Equality, in the terms that egalitarian equalists are comfortable in defining it, implies that that every individual is equally matched in both value and utility within a totality of random challenges. Aside from this being patently false, it also demerits both strengths and weaknesses when that individual succeeds or fails at a particular challenge as a result of their individual character.

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Not much of a witch, if she can’t spell her way out.

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Yeah, it’s a cheap shot, but it’s still a shot.

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The Democrat Party, on the other hand, brokers green cards for poor foreigners.

Which would you rather have in your country?

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During the anxiety-ridden 19th and 20th centuries in particular, Chinese reformers of multiple political persuasions engaged in thoroughgoing critical reevaluations of Chinese civilization in an attempt to diagnose the cause of China’s woes, and to identify which aspects of Chinese culture would need to be transformed to ensure their country’s transition into a new global order intact. Targets of criticism included Confucianism, government institutions, and the patriarchal family unit, among many others.

For a small but vocal group of Chinese modernizers, some of the most impassioned criticism was trained on the Chinese language. Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, famously called for a “literary revolution” to overthrow the “ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy,” and to promote the “plain, expressive literature of the people!” “In order to abolish Confucian thought,” the linguist Qian Xuantong (1887-1939) wrote, “first we must abolish Chinese characters. And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking, the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.” The celebrated writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) was yet another member of this anti-character chorus. “Chinese characters,” he argued, “constitute a tubercle on the body of China’s poor and laboring masses, inside of which the bacteria collect. If one does not clear them out, then one will die. If Chinese characters are not exterminated, there can be no doubt that China will perish.” For these reformers, abolishing characters would constitute a foundational act of Chinese modernity, unmooring China from its immense and anchoring past.

Actually, the problem seems to be the ideographic writing system rather than the language itself.

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WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

ZMan lays it out.

Yesterday’s post could have been much longer, as there are many angles to the modern American skins game. In the fullness of time, there will be many books written on the subject or at least using it as a launching pad in analyzing the late America collapse. One point of entry is belief. People are believing machines. They will organize themselves around a set of beliefs, even if those beliefs are insane. That is what we are seeing in modern America. Christianity has faded, so something new filled the void.

That something new is a grab bag of ideas borrowed from Cultural Marxism, hung like ornaments on the burnt out husk that is Christian universalism. That is modern Progressivism. Cultural Marxism, by itself, has never made much sense, but inflated with the zeal of universalism, it is a very powerful force in modern society. It certainly does not make a lot of sense and it does not offer anything as pleasing as an afterlife, but for the true believer, it fills the void that Christianity once filled.

That’s most obvious when it comes to race. Progressives are endlessly chanting that race is not real. They are also endlessly chanting that racism is the most dangerous evil spirit in their hierarchy of evil. Most of what is going on today is based in their belief that whites are racists, simply because whites have acted to benefit whites. The trouble for Progs, though, is that this contradicts their support for non-whites. Everywhere you turn, non-whites are out flying their team’s flag and cheering for their side against the honky.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Well, for one thing, he’s a Nazi:

And if they want him to host the Emmys, then the Emmys must be Nazi, too.

It’s all very simple.

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Well. There it is.

For the same reason, a free market outperforms a centrally directed economy. As Friedrich Hayek once said, no group of us is as smart as all of us.

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Actually, I don’t have a problem with that. Anybody who is rich enough to lay out half a mil on a visa, and wants to come to America badly enough to do so, is the sort of immigrant I think we ought to encourage.

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Good news, if true. Perhaps his Islam is in remission.

Corporations do not pay taxes. They merely collect taxes and pass the money on to the government; the taxes are paid by their customers in the form of higher prices. Low Information Voters don’t see this sleight-of-hand because they are dimwitted. The correct ‘corporate tax rate’ is zero.

To the extent that corporations have to collect taxes for the government, it raises the bar for achieving a successful business, because not only do they have to cover their actual costs but they have to pay the protection money imposed by government. Governments just love these Invisible Taxes; that’s why the VAT is so popular in Europe.

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The trouble with ‘virtue-signalling’ is that often it doesn’t so much signal virtue as foolishness.

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Every generation seems to be lionized by the press with the observation that the values of the new group are not that of their parents, thank goodness. They don’t have the serious hunger for possessions, the terrible acquisitiveness for material things that define their parents’ generation. Rather, as seen by the reporter, they have loftier views of society, generally the views of the reporter or the views that the reporter wishes to have us believe they hold. One recalls how the baby boomers were “not like us”. They were going to live on the land somewhere in the high sierras making sandals and candles. Some years later when it was revealed that the Pentagon was paying two thousand dollars for special toilet seats, the question among boomers was in what colors were they available.

Today much has been made of the sharply varying characteristics of the Millennial generation. During the recession and its prolonged twilight recovery we had to keep asking: “is it really a structural change we are seeing or just cyclical?” We have found in most cases when some see harbingers of dramatic changes in societal values it is often just economic realities at work. Wait for the data is a great admonition in such cases.

Steve Sailer does the fisking.

From The New Republic, a recantation by the co-author of the influential 2002 bookThe Emerging Democratic Majority (which I reviewed) of his thesis that the Democratic Party’s Coalition of the Fringes can eventually achieve one party rule over America.

…

As opposed to the 1950 and 1960s Censuses, in which 100 percent of Latinos were identified as white because, during that era of Flight to White, Latino organizations like LULAC successfully lobbied the Census Bureau into assuming that the Spanish surnamed were simply Caucasian. But then the Hispanic/Latino ethnicity was invented for the 1970 Census to facilitate handing out affirmative action privileges.

Or as opposed to how South Asians used to be counted as Caucasian … but then successfully lobbied to be grouped with Orientals in a new Asian category in order to be eligible for minority business development low interest loans and affirmative action on government contracting.

Or how Arab groups lobbied the Obama Administration to get themselves de-Whiteified through a 2020 new racial category called Middle Eastern and North African (nobody seems to know what the Trump Administration will do about the Obama Administration’s plan).

Want to know somebody’s Official Race? Follow the (Federal) money.

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Unexplained: How he can do that when he Lacks Empathy and is the New Hitler. I mean, the DemLegHump Media said it, so it MUST be true.

Joe Bob Briggs does the breakdown.

News executives love disasters. They get to act like Chuck Norris and Assemble the Squad.

“Maginnis, you cover first responders.”

“Wilson, get over to NOAA and stay on those maps.”

“Kelly, official press briefings. Work with Yurozawski to keep tabs on every emergency room within a 300-mile radius.”

“Bergram, you’re Cop Shop, but we’ll keep the aperiodic radio tracking the locals.”

“Ramstein, find that German guy who gets a hard-on for global warming.”

And yet Trump is the New Hitler.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/08/friday-funny-if-only-they-had-signed-that-treaty/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/08/friday-funny-if-only-they-had-signed-that-treaty/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/08/friday-funny-if-only-they-had-signed-that-treaty/

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The biggest surprise in President Trump’s willingness to work with Democrats is how much of a surprise it is to much of America. Expressions of shock are coming from all corners, suggesting that many of us view fierce polarization as normal and bipartisanship as abnormal.

If so, add that to the legacy of Barack Obama. He was the ultimate my-way or the highway president.

Dennis Prager takes a stab.

If someone asks what I am politically, I just say ‘anti-progressive’.

Like anti-Communist in the Good Old Days, it tells you everything you need to know.

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Oberlin is the alma mater of Lena Dunham and, somehow, Michelle Malkin. Until recently, it was the professional home to finally-fired, virulently anti-Semitic professor Joy Karega, who has suggested that Israel plotted the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. which killed 2,996 people.

Markets work, even when it’s Politically Incorrect.

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When the Marquess of Salisbury was asked whether there was a future for Randolph Churchill in the Conservative Party, is reputed to have said, ‘What man, having gotten rid of a boil on his neck, ever wishes it back again?’ I imagine that’s what a lot of Democrats are thinking about Hillary right now.

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We have the technology.