Category Archives: America

UPDATED (1/9/019): This Is What Israel’s Walls Look Like. Does The US Have Such Unscalable Things, Mr. President?

America, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In Israel, they call it a “security fence.” That sounds less foreboding. But this is no fence.

What the US has on its southern border is, for the most, … some fencing.

And this manned, near- impermeable wall is on Israel’s South, meant to stop illegal African immigrants, not necessarily terrorists. Via Breitbart:

UPDATE (1/9/019): 

 

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NEW COLUMN: The New Norm: Crime, But NOT Punishment

America, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democrats, Intelligence, Law, Pop-Culture, Private Property

NEW COLUMN IS “The New Norm: Crime, But Not Punishment.” 

It’s now on Townhall.com, slightly abridged, and unabridged on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

In the title of his magisterial book, Fyodor Dostoevsky paired “Crime and Punishment,” not crime and pardons, or crime and “Civics lessons,” amnesty and asylum.

Punishment must closely follow a crime in order to be both effective as a deterrent, as well as to serve as a public declaration of values and norms.

In explaining Texas justice and its attendant values, stand-up satirist Ron White performed the public service no politician is prepared to perform. “In Texas, we have the death penalty and we use it. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.”

So, where’s such clarity when you need it?

Something has gotten into the country’s lymphatic system. The infection is becoming more apparent by the day, not least in the way matters of life-and-death are debated (or not).

Again-and-again one hears boilerplate statements that fail to properly fix on the defining issues of our time, much less fix them.

Consider the flippancy over threats against persons and property, from within the country and from without it.

The home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is surrounded by a small, if menacing, mob, and his family threatened. Before dinging the man’s front door, the assailants chant out their criminal intentions:

“Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night. We know where you sleep.”

To which other talkers, even the wonderful Tucker, respond by vaporizing about rights to speech and protest vs. some or other watered-down peace and security to which private property owners are entitled.

Nobody alludes to the rights of private property or to the fulcrum that is law-and-order.

No demands for arrests are issued or voiced, publicly. No expectation for retribution is set-up. Follow-up is nonexistent in media. Police do not publicize any arrests. If they make them, none are reported by media.

No teachable moments occur.

Remember words like, “Police are requesting the public’s assistance in finding those responsible”? Or, “No arrests have been made, as yet”? Such civilizing utterances have vanished from the nomenclature of media and law enforcement, when discussing acts of trespass, vandalism, and public disorderliness.

Be they within the U.S. or from without it, acts that violate one person’s property rights or the property rights of many—as the Central American caravanners expect to do—these acts don’t conjure the requisite tough talk or actions. …

… READ THE REST.  It’s now on Townhall.com,  WND.COM and The Unz Review.

https://tinyurl.com/ybwcrevs

UPDATE (11/3/018): NEW COLUMN: If The Disunited States Of America Is To Survive …

America, Constitution, Culture, Democrats, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION

NEW COLUMN is “If The Disunited States Of America Is To Survive …” It’s currently on Townhall.com, WND.COM and the Unz Review. And, it’s on American Greatness, too.

And excerpt:

“We are one American nation. We must unite. We have to unify. We have to come together.”

Every faction in our irreparably fractious and fragmented country calls for unity, following events that demonstrate just how disunited the United States of America is.

They all do it.

Calls for unity come loudest from the party of submissives—the GOP. The domineering party is less guilt-ridden about this elusive thing called “unity.”

Democrats just blame Republicans for its absence in our polity and throughout our increasingly uncivil society.

These days, appeals to unity are made by opportunistic politicians, who drape themselves in the noble toga of patriotism on tragic occasions. The latest in many was the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre of Oct. 27.

In the name of honesty—and comity—let us quit the unity charade.

The U.S. is not united. Neither is America a nation in any meaningful way. It hasn’t been one for a long time.

Consider: In the late 1780s, Americans debated whether to nationalize government or keep it a decentralized affair. The discussion was one in which all early Americans partook, nationwide.

Think about the degree of unity that feat required!

The eternal verities of republicanism and limited government were understood and accepted by all Americans. The young nation’s concerns centered on the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. (The Anti-Federalists, the unsung heroes who gave us the Bill of Rights, turned out to be right.)

Around the time The Federalist Papers were published in American newspapers—Americans were a nation in earnest.

For it takes a nation to pull that off—to debate a set of philosophical and theoretical principles like those instantiated in these Papers, Federalist and Anti-Federalist.

The glue that allowed so lofty a debate throughout early America is gone (not to mention the necessary gray matter).

The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 4 million but 327 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust.

Each year, elites pile atop this mass of seething antagonists another million newcomers.

Democrats, who control the intellectual means of production—schools, social media, TV, the print press, the publishing houses, think tanks, the Permanent Bureaucracy—they insist mass immigration comports with “who we are as a people.”

The last is yet another hollow slogan—much like the unity riff. …

… READ THE REST. THE NEW COLUMN, “If The Disunited States Of America Is To Survive, …” is on Townhall.com, WND.COM and the Unz Review. And, on American Greatness, too.

UPDATE (11/3/018): Love my American Greatness readers. Smart and knowledgeable (not least about the “S” word):

1G25 • 26 minutes ago

One of the most thoughtful and intelligent writings I’ve seen on the internet.

” A peaceful society is one founded on voluntary associations, not forced integration.”

Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism (Part 2).

Africa, America, History, Nationhood, South-Africa, The State

NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism” (Part 2). It’s now on Townhall.com. You can also read it on the Unz Review and WND.Com.

An excerpt:

Monomaniacal Westerners—they have one thing on their minds: it begins with an “R”—have come to think and speak of apartheid as a theory of white supremacy.

It was not.

The policy of “separate development,” as it was admittedly euphemized, was not a theory of racial supremacy, but a strategy for survival.

But first: To perceive the fundamental way in which the Afrikaner and American creeds differed early on we must first examine the former’s ideas of what a nation and a state were, respectively.

America, being a rib from the British ribcage, was built on liberal individualism; Afrikaner culture was first and foremost grounded in the survival of the Volk.

This is not to say that Afrikaners were not fiercely individualistic; they were, even more so than early Americans.

For the Boers, however, the nation encompassed “the land, the culture, the terrain, the people.” The state, on the other hand, had no such prestige for the Boers, who regarded it as just “the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians.” Against this apparatus, above all, the Boer rebelled.

The 19th century found him still resisting majority rule, by which time Americans had thoroughly submitted to it. Although the Boer’s outlook remained passionately political, his preference was for parochial self-rule.

It might be said, then, that if in the Americans the vagaries of the frontier bred an atomistic individualism, those same vagaries bred in the Afrikaner a very different attitude, namely, a keen sense of the collective and the need to preserve it. “The worth of the nation is even higher than the worth of the individual,” exclaimed one Volk philosopher.

To the existential threat which they faced on the Dark Continent, Afrikaners therefore responded by circling the wagons metaphorically (much as they had done, literally, during the 1830s) and devising the corpus of racial laws known as apartheid.

“We shall fight for our existence and the world must know it. We are not fighting for money or possessions. We are fighting for the life of our people,” thundered Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958 – 1966).

Prime Minister D. F. Malan (1948 – 1954) had already used different words for the same sentiment, announcing his devotion to, “My God, my people, my country.”

Malan’s successor, Prime Minister Strijdom (1954 – 1958), believed unswervingly that if they were to survive as a group, the whites of South Africa would need to retain a position of guardianship, and that ultimately, white hegemony was indispensable for the good of all.

The Cape Town-Stellenbosch axis of the nationalist intelligentsia, which was the most influential lobby in Malan’s National Party (NP), almost without exception defended apartheid not as an expression of white superiority but on the grounds of its assumed capacity to reduce conflict by curtailing points of interracial contact. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism” (Part 2). It is now on Townhall.com. You can also read it on the Unz Review and WND.Com