Category Archives: Human Accomplishment

Menstrual America: Culture Of Crying, Quitting And Kneeling

America, Etiquette, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Race, Racism, Sport

Culture of Crybabies: When the Crybaby is King

Tucker Carlson mocked the weeping and abreacting congressmen and Capitol police force, who are without shame or dignity, during the Jan 6 hearings, now underway.

But you see, in American culture, weeping, sniveling and making ugly faces in public is considered a display of authenticity, true grief and hence virtue.

In English-influenced cultures like South Africa and Canada, crying in public is more likely to be considered tacky, showy and often insincere.

Personally, sharing grief with strangers would be difficult, phony and futile.

The Insider:

Police officers, who were attacked by a pro-Trump mob that descended on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, delivered emotional testimonies of their experiences on January 6, pushing some lawmakers to tears.

Video shows House lawmakers, including Reps. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Zoe Lofgren tearing up at the accounts of the officers who were at the Capitol and at footage of the insurrection. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, a Democrat from New Hampshire, was also seen wiping away tears as she left the hearing on Tuesday.

The “Protectors” still can’t cope:

“The four officers testifying — DC Metropolitan Police Officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, plus Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell …
More than six months later, January 6 still isn’t over for me,” Dunn, a Black officer who endured racist attacks from insurrectionists during the assault, told the panel. “I know so many other officers continue to hurt, both physically and emotionally,”

Culture of Quitters:

Part of the Olympian spirit is grit: Showing up, and dealing with the stress of performance, if only for your teammates. But American women are perfecting, displaying on the world stage, and likely exporting and normalizing our therapeutic culture.

Simone Biles, who shocked the Olympic world Tuesday when she pulled out of the U.S. team gymnastics finals, said the emotional toll of the Tokyo Games, not a physical injury, prompted her withdrawal.
“Physically, I feel good. I’m in shape,” she told Hoda Kotb on NBC’s “TODAY” show following her exit. “Emotionally, it varies on the time and moment. Coming to the Olympics and being head star isn’t an easy feat.”
She explained further to NBC’s Andrea Joyce that her struggle was “more mental, and we’re just dealing with a couple of things internally.” NBC)

The progressive media, run by silly women (many with the Y chromosome), are praising the quitting as an incontestable personal triumph. How standards have been inverted! What was once considered a failure is now a triumph. See, if anxiety makes performance impossible, there is no need to frame failure as a win. We can sympathize and commiserate, but let us applaud those who BRING IT despite the jitters.

Japan might rethink letting an American-minded primadonna represent them. The media is  obfuscating what went down with tennis player Naomi Osaka, so I am unsure as to whether she has withdrawn from the 2020 Olympics competition, of if she just lost. She had, however, withdrawn from “the French Open in May after refusing to participate in media availabilities.

Culture of Kneeling

American athletes are becoming real killjoys. It is they who started the dumbass kneeling or taking a knee, and have now infected the world with it.

Read: “Taking a Knee is Akin To Taking A Pee.”

*Image courtesy CNN

A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

America, Founding Fathers, History, Human Accomplishment, Individual Rights, Liberty, Political Philosophy

“Let us … toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.”ILANA MERCER, July 4, 2019

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson‘s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of the collective mentality of the D.C. establishment “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson‘s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England‘s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
SEE: “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration,” by Ilana Mercer, July 4, 2019

Dubai Builds Solid Skyscrapers On Reclaimed Land

Affirmative Action, America, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Middle East

Dubai builds 52-story buildings on reclaimed land. America’s structural engineers are signing off on inspections of crumbling structures.

I had suggested that this falls under the rubric of “Systemic, Institutional Rot,” in a column on the Big Freeze in Texas, fires in California, colliding trains on land and Navy vessels at sea, and hey, a pedestrian bridge has already collapsed in Florida.

The Sheikh over in Dubai hires top talent that knows how to ensure that the ground can support the structure before proceeding to build upon it. (My thanks to Sean for this interesting juxtaposition.)

“A pancake collapse, such as at the oceanfront condo tower in Surfside, Florida, is a ‘progressive failure’ that often begins at the bottom: A load-bearing element is damaged, usually in a building’s lower floors or foundation, which triggers the top floors to collapse vertically into the floors below, said Necati Catbas, a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering at the University of Central Florida.” (CNN)

*Image: The Palm Tower location map in Palm Jumeirah (famproperties.com)

Not YouToo, Sharon Stone

Celebrity, Feminism, Film, Gender, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment

You can’t fake the neck, which usually shows a woman’s age. Sharon Stone is still gorgeous.

She’s a good actress, too, whose greatest role was in “Casino,” “as Ginger, the moll to Robert DeNiro’s casino mogul in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Las Vegas crime epic.” She outperformed the leading man.

But now, Ms. Stone is threatening to spoil it all by turning on a scene she nailed so well in “Basic Instinct.”

A scene featuring Stone suggestively crossing and uncrossing her legs [sans panties] during a police interrogation garnered much attention and has even been spoofed in more than a few projects.

(CNN)

A woman once so powerful in her beauty expects us to believe she was helpless in that power and beauty. Nonsense. Don’t peter out like the whining MeToo fems, Sharon Stone.

*Image courtesy Hola