Fine Lines

The award of the month, perhaps of the year, goes to James Kunstler. He opined in his Monday commentary that the United States, "is bypassing the banana republic stage of dissolution and depravity and steaming quickly into a Hieronymus Bosch dystopia of financial, social, psychological and moral ruin."

Mistakes Were Made

For a couple of years conservatives were hanging their hopes, actually more than mere hopes, on the "Durham Report." It was going to reveal the criminal conspiracy. Heads were going to roll. People were going to be thrown into prison. All would be set right with our government.

Now that it has been published, it consists merely of "Mistakes were made," but only by a few people at the top. The lower echelon was just following orders. We don't need to make changes, and no one needs to be prosecuted, we just need to be more careful.

Precisely as I predicted when the investigation was initially announced.

"No One Knows"

Jon Schwartz writes on the debt ceiling fight in The Intercept today. His CV is presented, but is unintelligible. It tells us he's written a bunch of stuff for several publications, but gives no indication why we should think that he knows anything about anything other than, perhaps, the English language. He is, in my opinion, a typical opinionist of today.

"No one knows what would happen at that point," he begins, "that point" being the nation reaching the debt limit without Congress raising it.

He then proceeds to inform us of precisely what would happen at "that point," including that it, "almost certainly would be deeply unpleasant, with huge job losses, unpredictable bits of the economy imploding, and knock-on effects in other countries that will make them both fear and hate us for decades."

In other words, "No one knows what would happen except me, and I'm going to tell you."  Aren't we lucky?

Good Read

One has to be selective at “Taki’s Magazine.” Some content is rumination along the lines of, “I was having brunch at the Patesserie in Geneva with Lord Highnose last Wednesday and…” I skip those because I don’t really care to know that skiing conditions in Switzerland were less than excellent.

But many of the pieces, especially those by Taki himself, present some very trenchant and witty approaches to events of the day, and can at the same time be significantly thought provoking. For the most part, they seem to me to be more populist than either left or right.

There is an offering today by David Cole in response to a Pew poll which found that a sizeable majority feels that we were better off in 1973 than we are today, 50 years later. He professes not to be surprised at the result, but is amusingly surprised and annoyed that our governing elites do not like us feeling that way.

It’s a lengthy piece and well worth reading in its entirety, but an excerpt:

Because indeed, leftists should marvel at what they’ve accomplished with shockingly little resistance.

Children are born without a known gender; the doctor makes a guess. Every child must then be guided by adults to discover their gender, at which time it’s up to medical specialists to alter the child’s hormones, surgically remove the child’s penis and mold it into a vagina, or, conversely, surgically remove the child’s breasts and create a penis out of a vagina, and only then will the child be as nature intended. Alone among the creatures of the earth, human children cannot develop—indeed cannot survive—without surgical alteration, and this is perfectly natural, like baby teeth falling out.

How can leftists not be in absolute awe that they’ve succeeded in making this societal canon? Untouchable canon; if you dare to question it, you’re attacked as a murderer. You’re not just wrong, but genocidal. You can even be a leftist icon, J.K. Rowling, hell, Dee Snider, and one word of doubt about the canon, you’re banished.

Has anything this batshit ever become as accepted (by government, academia, and private industry) and as enforced as orthodoxy in so short a period of time?

It’s an astounding achievement.

He goes on to aver that “trannyism” is assuming the place formerly held by ADHD as the parent’s escape for being unable to control their children.

Trannyism has taken a normal dynamic (kids give parents grief; parents become exasperated and embarrassed by their perceived failures) and created a new, noble reason for an old problem: “My child is not ‘bad,’ my child is not ‘stupid,’ and I’m not a failed parent. My child’s been living in an unnatural state! Once the doctors unlock the true gender with their scalpels, all will be well!”

Trannyism means you’re not a lousy parent and your kid isn’t genetic detritus; you’re a hero on a crusade to save your child from a society that until now was based on the lie that kids don’t need genital surgery to be their natural, healthy, whole self.

He does miss the popular slogan advocating communism, “You will own nothing and you will be happy.”